You speak; you’ve made a dent in the streaming of language. Speak – and you’ve made a stand in speech, although it is by means of speech that you’ve made this stand. But what kind of stand is this?
The 8 year old Thomas Bernhard is cycling, and cycling as far and as fast as he can. His bicycle belongs to his guardian, but he has reclaimed it as his own, painting it silver and cycling around the countryside. Today he has resolved to visit his Aunt in Salzburg, 22 miles away. It’s a long trip; how can a child cycle this far, and on his own? But as little Bernhard does so, it is with the dream of joining the cycling elite, even though he’s too small to reach the pedals while he is sitting on the saddle.
The 8 year old knows his trip is forbidden, that he might be punished, but he thinks his audacity will be so admired it will annul his offence. One of his stockings is torn and covered with oil; he grows weary, and the road seems to become ever longer. Then – disaster – his bicycle chain breaks, and he tumbles into a ditch. It’s dark, and there are 7 or 8 miles to go, his bike is ruined and his clothes are torn …
So with Bernhard’s narration of his cycling trip. The trip is also a trip in prose; the maelstrom of the prose is the maelstrom of language; Bernhard writes against the wind, against style in the effort of the prose, its forward movement as it gathers everything up in its momentum. Controlled madness, held together at the brink of falling apart, the great loops of the sentences rolling forward. Discord, disequilibrium: style strains language all the way to the point of breaking (but it does not break).
Bernhard, prose-cyclist: think of him as he first begins to write, as he finds the strength to continue. Think of him writing before he shows his work in progress to his lifeperson, who tells him whether to discard the piece or continue. He begins again; his narrator is much like the narrators in all his books. He begins, and each book is pretty similar to the other.
But the strength to begin again, to see through a book! The strength to hold it together, to write through the days and nights! To let himself be caught and borne up the rhythms of language! And in the breaks of that rhythm, like the hard carapace of a lobster cracked open: the meat of language in its density, its thickness. Language in its black, glistening darkness, there before any story, before anyone could say ‘I’.
There are no autobiographies. Or none that can reach back into the black blood that surges before the beginning. Impersonal language, like a sea of oil. Language whose waves must part before anyone can say ‘I’. No autobiographies. For how might you write of your birth into language?
What did Bernhard discover when he wrote Frost (or when his first story was published, or his first poem)? Language open to enclose him. As though he had struggled back up the stream; he found his way to the head of the waters, to the rivers rising on the mountains where there were no speakers yet. To write – isn’t to come under the spell of the origin? To travel back through language until there was no speaker yet. Or is it to travel forward, when language breaks like black oil upon no shore?
And once you have begun to write there is no end, just as there is no end to speech. One book, another. One and then another, all the way up to the end. Newfoundland: wasn’t that to be the last book, the last feast, when language breaks open its carapace? When it reveals itself as only black oil, black blood, black meat?
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