Interview with Lars Iyer

This is a full-length version of a written interview conducted by Lisa Akhila Plakolm and Juliane Werner of the GlobalBernhard project team, based in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. A shortened version of the interview was published in a book to accompany the exhibition ‘Thomas Bernhard Today’ at the Literature Museum of the Austrian National Library (April 29, 2026 – February 21, 2027)

1

Who is Thomas Bernhard to you, on a personal level?
Henry Rollins, speaking of the late Mark E. Smith, lead singer of the group, The Fall:

He really is that guy you hoped you could be, but weren’t. If you’re in band, you really don’t want to care what anyone thinks, but you do. And you really want to be able to crank out a new record every nine months, but you can’t. And you’d love to keep surprising people and baffling your critics by every three albums or so turning out your best album, but you don’t.

Thomas Bernhard really was that literary writer you’d hoped to be, but weren’t. He really didn’t care what anyone thought, even as you do. He really was able to publish a book every nine months or so, as you can’t. He really did keep surprising his readers with the brilliant new variations of his kunstmaschine, as you signally fail to do.

Bernhard couldn’t be bothered with literary prestige, but it came to him anyway; he broke all the rules of the literary game, but won at it effortlessly. He wrote abusive letters to his editor, to the papers, but that was accepted as a foible of genius. He insulted his audience in his speeches at prize-giving ceremonies, but that was just Bernhard being Bernhard.

That’s the legend, anyway – and there’s some truth in the legend. The point is that Bernhard acts as a kind of frontier myth in the literary world (just as Mark E. Smith did in the musical world): a culture hero relatively unbound by convention, who isn’t expected to follow the usual rules.

The danger is that Bernhard thereby becomes a permitted eccentric, allowed to deviate from societal and artistic norms only to re-enforce their ubiquity. There’s a conventional way of being unconventional, and his role as the Austrian nest-besmircher risks becomes as reassuring as British ‘national treasure’ Mark E. Smith edgily holding forth in the pub.

We like to domesticate our heroes—in Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘to prize a loveably idiosyncratic individual over the confounding brilliance of the work itself’. But of course, in the case of Bernhard (just as in the case with The Fall) there is the monumental presence of the work: nine novels! Five volumes of autobiography! Numerous plays and short stories! Film scripts! Letters!

The marvel: Bernhard discovered a new power of expression. He rejected what were and still are regarded as essential elements of novelistic craft – lifelike dialogue, variations in tone, enriching shifts in point of view, etc. – insofar as they create a reality-effect which, for him, is simply bad faith. He has no interest in replaying the old cliches, confirming the reign of the usual-usual, sustaining the mundane status quo, shoring up the sameness of the same, reconfirming the tedious parameters of our God-is-long-dead world of medium-sized dry goods.

The famous Bernhardian kunstmaschine really gets going with Prince Sarau’s still astonishing hundred-page monologue in Gargoyles (1967), remorselessly following its own logic, performing its own incomparable gestures, indifferent to everything but the baroque curlicues of its own unfolding. Through Lime Works (1970), Correction (1975) and onwards, Bernhard’s inimitable literary performance – as though he were speaking aloud into his typewriter, Elfride Jelinek says – delights in coming to itself ever-anew (as fiction, but also as theatre, as film script, as memoir.)

Bernhard’s art of extremity knows and revels in its own extremism, not in a smug way – pleased with its own virtuosity or intelligence – but with a laughing sense of perpetual possibility. It’s as though everything – all experience – was just waiting to be fed into the Bernhardian kunstmaschine.

2

What impression did your first encounter with Bernhard’s work leave on you?

I was unable to grasp the full radicality of Bernhard’s work on first encounter, in the early ‘90s. I was unable to separate his protagonist-narrators – Geistesmenschen, men of mind and spirit, engaged in obsessive intellectual projects which they find not only impossible to bring to completion, but even to begin – from Dostoevsky’s Underground Man. Of course, Bernhard’s monologists are descended from Dostoevsky’s; but I wasn’t yet ready to take them on their own terms. His work hadn’t become essential to me.

My real encounter with Bernhard began fifteen years later, when I had completely failed at my own philosophical project – not because I couldn’t bring it to term, but because I could: disastrously. Back in the early 2000s when, after years of part-time work, I found a permanent academic position (the topic of Leviathan, my novel-in-progress.) Like so many others working under those circumstances, I’d been in a frantic hurry to get things in print. Publish or perish, right? Unlike Bernhard’s narrators, I simply had to finish what I was writing: I needed a job!

Come my mid-30s – the same age as Hegel, when he was drafting Phenomenology of Spirit, as Heidegger, when he drafting Being and Time; the same age as Merleau-Ponty when he published the Phenomenology of Perception – and I had a dubious little oeuvre of articles and even books behind me. At that point, with job security that permitted me to plan ahead, with an income sufficient to allow me some of life’s comforts (not least a damp-infested flat), any sensible person would have taken the opportunity to slow down, to go to earth, to undertake a few years of patient scholarly work, which might mean that they would eventually have something to say.

But I wasn’t sensible. So horrified was I by what I had published – by what was irrevocably out there, in the world (and sure, I knew that academic books have tiny audiences) – that I could write of little else at the blog that I started at that time: Spurious, which became the source of my fiction.

If it’s possible to write of the ‘primal scene’ of my fiction, it would have been when I looked through the proofs of my first academic book. I was amazed: the copyeditors had actually added typos and grammatical errors to the many typos and grammatical errors that already existed in the manuscript. There were printer’s errors, too: great gaps in the middle of the page. But the real disaster was the book itself – not least because of what it attempted and did not bring off: prose in the ‘brown style’, calm and measured; masterly French-style explication of the text … The catastrophe of the book, my collapsed project, was nobody’s fault but mine. How was it to be undone? Impossible; the book was coming out; it would be in university libraries with my name on it.

Those were the conditions of a true encounter with Bernhard’s work. Who else was going to help me write of my disappointment – even my horror – at my own prose? Our greatest UK Bernhardian, literary blogger Stephen Mitchelmore recalled me to the Austrian’s novels. Now I could see what his Geistesmenschen were about, in the manner they thought against themselves, against their botched projects; in the way they were able to keep the wound open, venting their bile and general loathing.

But this Bernhardian turn was about more than indulging my own masochism – or rather, it allowed masochism to become something else. With their totalising, apodictic statements, their manic generalisations, their insane catastrophization, their out-of-all-proportion extravagances, Bernhard’s intellectuals revel in their wildness and absurdity. Theirs is a joy in the performance of despair – in the very way in which their negativism is exaggerated, hystericized, losing all proportion.

The Bernhardian monologist might begin with this or that vexation, but his ire expands into the virtuosity of a more general naysaying that is allowed to range over the most arbitrary objects of criticism. The ranging is the thing; what matters is not what is said, so much as how it is said – the ‘how’ of Bernhard’s musical, looping, fugue-like prose, of a style not merely adequate to what was to be said, but that lifts itself above it, laughs at it, laughs at itself, laughs at everything, thereby inverting its own negativism, changing its value.

And so the fulminations of Bernhard’s narrators became my inspiration. His example invited me to find a way to perform my horror at my own philosophical sins, to be sure, but also to deepen the object of that horror, to discover the joy of waxing negative in a fitting literary performance. He allowed me to progress from decrying a particular problem – that of publishing a bad book or two; the existence of my dubious philosophical prose in the world – to bemoaning (laughingly, hyperbolically) the original sin that I had existed at all; indeed, to the fact that anything had existed. (E.M. Cioran: ‘If I were asked to summarise as briefly as possible my vision of things, to reduce it to its most succinct expression, I should replace words with an exclamation point, a definitive !’ – like Bernhard, I wanted to express the !)

Sure, I couldn’t correct or exterminate my academic writing out of existence, by analogy to the goal of the narrators of Bernhard’s novels Correction and Extinction; but bad philosophy could become the occasion of a hopefully less-than-bad literary performance.

3

How do you view Bernhard’s writing today? Have your responses to it changed over time?

The importance of Bernhard’s work lies in what I have come to understand as a transvaluation of values – not only of literary values, reflected in the emphasis on craft skills such as plot, character development, sensuous description – but also broader sociopolitical, worldly ones.

The phrase ‘transvaluation of values’ comes from Nietzsche, of course. And I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s account in the Antichrist of Paul of Tarsus – St Paul of the letters in the New Testament – as accomplishing just such a transvaluation.

Paul celebrates the messiah who died on the Cross, as well as the poor and the outcast. Nietzsche is predictably appalled: the Pauline revolution expresses ‘a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers’. For Nietzsche, Paul nihilistically transvalues the values of his time, inverting the value of the noble and the beautiful.

For others – including philosopher of religion Jacob Taubes – this transvaluation is to be celebrated. From the perspective of the Roman empire, with all its might and glory, Paul might appear to be a nihilist. He asks his readers to love those regarded as outcasts, as human refuse; asks us to rethink the ugly death of the supposed messiah as the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy – as a sacrifice that repays the debt of human sinfulness. But this overturning opens a new era, in which revolt against imperial power can take a spiritual form, an inward conversion, a way of living against the world – what Taubes (very idiosyncratically) calls Gnosticism.

We find an analogy to Paul’s revaluation of values in a very famous passage from Bernhard’s volume of autobiography, The Cellar: An Escape, celebrating the decision of the sixteen-year old author’s decision to abandon his conventional education and the stifling hypocrisies of middle-class Salzburg by heading, as he says, ‘in the opposite direction’ [die entgegengesetzte Richtung]:

I knew why I had made the woman at the labour exchange take out dozens of cards from her card-index: it was because I wanted to go in the opposite direction. This was the phrase I had repeated to myself over and over again on my way to the labour exchange. Again and again I had used the phrase in the opposite direction. The woman did not understand what I meant, for I actually told her that I wanted to go in the opposite direction. She probably thought I was out of my mind, for I used the phrase to her several times. How can she possibly understand me, I thought, when she knows nothing about me, not the slightest thing? Driven to desperation by me and her card-index, she offered me a number of apprenticeships, but none of them was in the opposite direction and I had to turn them down. I did not just want to go in a different direction – it had to be the opposite direction, a compromise being no longer possible. So the woman had to go on taking cards out of her card-index and I had to go on rejecting the addresses on the cards , because I refused to compromise: I wanted to go in the opposite direction, not just a different one. […]

And so on, over the next few astonishing pages, where Bernhard tells us how he came to take a job as an assistant shopkeeper in the poorest, grimmest but most anarchic district: the Scherzhauserfeld Settlement. Soon, he’d contract a serious illness working in the titular cellar, and that, aged eighteen, he’d end up in the hospital where he’d contract tuberculosis. But it was the opposite direction he wanted, regardless of outcome.  

The point is to read the young Bernhard’s desire for the opposite direction as a revaluation.

Let me draw out the unlikely-seeming parallels with Paul of Tarsus to make this point.

Paul transvalues the ugliness of death on the Cross into a symbol of triumph. Bernhard transmutes values of sober investment in the future, pursuance of a recommended career, etc. into comically perverse defiance. Paul celebrates what Taubes calls ‘a subterranean society, a little but Jewish, a little Gentile, nobody knows, what sort of lowlifes are these anyway’. Bernhard celebrates the poor, chaotic but vital life of working-class Salzburg as an antidote to middle-class conventionalism.

Paul turns his followers inward, interiorising the messianic idea. The young Bernhard likewise turns to a passionate but groundless inward faith in the opposite direction – in a kind of freedom, albeit negative, not only from the sociopolitical order, but from authority as such.

It is this inward faith, I want to suggest, that bears the young Bernhard through his difficult formative years, all the way to the point when he begins to write. It is a faith against everything sensible, everything planned, everything secure. It is a flight from the world – a way of living against it, in an inward critique of all existence. It is a way of giving a minimal meaning to life by opposing the legitimacy of the world around him. And it’s this faith in anarchy, this antinomianism, that is incarnated in Bernhard’s literary style.

The young Bernhard has no attachment to the world as he finds it – to its political, cultural and moral status quo. If there were others like him, he might form some vanguard, a modernist revolutionary movement, seeking to recreate the world from scratch. But he was on his own, without allies, except for his dying grandfather (Johannes Freumbichler: a literary author himself, and the model of Bernhard’s Geistesmenschen.) Literary writing became his way of negation – abolishing and transvaluing his investment in the world.

Another comparison to Paul, to bring out this point. What kind of life does he advocate for his followers? It is to live ‘as though not’ (hōs mē), in which the meaning of worldly relations and actions is suspended:

The appointed time has grown short. From now on, let even those who have wives be as though they had none, and those who mourn as though they were not mourning, and those who rejoice as though they were not rejoicing, and those who buy as though they had no possessions, and those who deal with the world as though they had no dealings with it. For the present form of this world is passing away. I want you to be free from anxieties. (1 Corinthians 7:29, my emphasis)

For Paul, the world decays; the form of the world is passing. The Messiah was nailed to the cross, but he rose, and he will return.

For Bernhard, the world isn’t decaying; the form of the world is not passing, and there are plenty of reasons for anxiety. But there remains a life to be lived – indeed, written – in the opposite direction. Thin gruel, compared to Paul, when there is no hope of the returning messiah, when the Last Judgement isn’t nigh after all. But living in the opposite direction becomes, with Bernhard, a distinctive ethos (a Gnostic ethos, in Taubes’s terms) – a way of living against a world in which you have no investment.

What is to be done? Write – and write against existing literary values. Write, and transvalue literary writing. Destroy and recreate the world and the values of the world …

4

Do you consider Bernhard a writer for the 21st century?

Stephen Dowden is astute on the social and political conditions of Bernhard’s work, suggesting that we understand his prose in terms of what Paul Celan called a Gegenwort, a counterword. The reason why Bernhard rejects the familiar techniques of novelistic craft – well-rounded characters, involved and complex plotting, rich sensuous description and so on – is because they would reassure us that the world remains exactly as it was prior to the rise of Austro-German Nazism. Bernhard deliberately writes against what Dowden calls ‘exhausted narrative ploys and poetic forms’ not because of some general modernist impulse, but because he would reject ‘inherited cultural complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century’.

Unable to transcend or even accept the catastrophe of twentieth-century Austrian life religiously or philosophically or politically or intellectually, Bernhard transforms it into style. His style imposes form on the spiritual experience of his time. His startlingly original prose art is in itself an act of civil disobedience at the same time that it is an expression of his estranged individuality as well as a frontal assault on the literary status quo.

For Dowden, Bernhard’s literary transvaluation is very specific in its origin as a response to the Austrian Nazism and its subsequent cover-up. Bernhard’s hyperbolic, provocative, all-encompassing tirades; his use of words like always, everything, everywhere, absolute; his staging of fury and resentment are a direct result of the Nazi horror. In the use of devices like repetition and italicization, in his deployment of parallel syntactic structures, in his long, spiraling sentences, in the absence of paragraph breaks, Bernhard is staging what is repressed by the apparent normalcy of the Austria of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s – something which, Dowden argues, his Hemingway-influenced German-language peers failed to do.

Dowden’s is a powerful claim. But if what I’ve called Bernhard’s literary transvaluation is primarily a response to Nazism and the subsequent downplaying of this atrocity – as Austria became known for its cultural achievements: for the Vienna Boys Choir, for Strauss’s waltzes, for Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert rather than political horror – what does this mean for the legacy of his stylistic devices. Are they only to be broken out in times of emergency? Can they only be deployed in the aftermath of similar moral collapse?

I have argued elsewhere that Bernhard’s prose is appropriate for articulating any impulse that works against the political and moral status quo; that it answers to an antinomian impulse to which Taubes links Gnosticism.

Here, the comparison with Paul of Tarsus becomes relevant again. As Taubes emphasizes, Paul suspends not only the Mosaic law, but also the legal framework of the Roman Empire and even the Hellenistic metaphysics of law, which is to say, the general sense of worldly order and structure. Paul rejects all earthly, lawful, orderly authority in the name of faith. Bernhard’s equivalent to faith, that is, his Gnostic ethos of living in the opposite direction, likewise suspends earthly authority. It doesn’t concern only Austrian Nazism, Austrian Catholicism, Austrian socialism or Austrian institutions and culture in general, but in the practice of writing against the conditions (the worldly values) of any time, including our own.

So how might we understand our own values? A vast question! A partial answer: Byung Chul-Han has suggested that we inhabit an ‘achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft]’, where the affirmation ‘yes, we can’ exemplifies an emphasis on projects, initiatives and motivation, a drive to maximize productivity. Nothing is impossible for the achievement-subject so long as it applies its will, as long as it martials a productive relation to time. Yes we can! But there are moments where the achievement-subject is ‘no longer able to be able [nicht mehr können kann]’; the result is ‘creative fatigue and exhausted ability [Schaffens- und Könnensmüdigkeit]’.

The achievement-society produces ‘depressives and losers’, as Han calls them, who are unable to achieve as they should. Might these depressives and losers occupy a position analogous to Bernhard’s monologists? If they’re to become writers of the Bernhardian kind (not as imitators of the Austrian master, but as sui generis reinventors of Gnostic literary performance), their aim must be to invert the valuation of economically manageable skillsets; of productive self-motivation, of self-management, of self-realization; of the needs of the market in the achievement society. And it must be to re-value experiences of fatigue and exhaustion, of failure and underachievement, of idleness and time-squandering  (of what Bataille and Blanchot might call désoeuvrement, worklessness or unworking), bringing them to literary expression.

5

In what ways does your own work enter into conversation with his?

Writing to his editor in 1973, Bernhard is already complaining about his copyists: ‘so many books that I open prove to me just how many writers have read my prose. I am constantly confronted with grandchildren and related grandchildren of my characters. Impact is something terrible after all’.

The question is how we can achieve a style of our own, preventing us from becoming Bernhardian grandchildren – mere tribute acts, literary impressionists? Literary transvaluation must be renewed, meaning that it cannot be a Bernhardian fire that needs to be kept burning, but the fire as such, a Gnostic conflagration of literature against literature.

If I’ve escaped the fate of becoming a Bernhardian epigone, it might be because my work consisted entirely of dialogue. Although full of Bernhardian hyperbole, in Spurious and my other novels – full of implied self-criticism, I made my critic into a dialogue partner – W. to my Lars. It was W. who bemoaned the original sin that I – or my autofictional proxy – existed. It was their (one-sided) exchanges that were the thing – their comic banter, which recalled the Beckett of Godot and Endgame – but also the British comic tradition that you find in Withnail and I. Sure, I borrowed some of Bernhard’s stylistic devices – elements of fugue-like repetition and italicization for emphasis (although this also came from lettering in comics) – but I eschewed others.

This wasn’t a conscious decision. I’d arrived at this way of writing after trying and failing to write monologues – I could never bring them to life. And I kept trying my hand at monologues, even as readers insisted that the dialogical posts featuring W. and Lars, were the only thing worth reading on the blog. But in the end I had to accept that my particular kunstmaschine, my Puffing Billy, ran on dialogue, drawing thematically upon Jewish philosophical thinking (Rosenzweig, Scholem, Levinas, Bielik-Robson with the address to the Other at its heart …)

6

Have you ever drawn directly on Bernhard in your writing? If so, how did that come about?

W.G. Sebald always included a tip of the hat to his favourite writers, taking the form of ‘invisible quotations’ – as Michael Hofman points out, the messengers in the Brussels Palace of Justice in Austerlitz are lifted straight from the first page of Kafka’s The Trial. I don’t borrow whole descriptions from other others, but I have used the phrase ‘the opposite direction’ in my own work as an acknowledgement of the Austrian master.

7

How do you imagine Bernhard might have responded to your books?

The obvious answer would be to say, with revulsion! But of course to dream of Bernhard’s disapproval would grant him the too-convenient function of an Official Curmudgeon, the Bad Father, who says ‘no’. This is a mere reversal of the approver, the Good Mother, who simply says ‘yes’, who affirms everything you might do. Granting him the role of permitted contrarian would transform being cursed by Bernhard into being blessed by him. The alternative is to understand his significance as a transvaluer of literary values, where the ‘no’ is not a mirror image of the ‘yes’. The challenge of writing after Bernhard and wanting to carry forward his revolution is to find new strategies to unleash negativism in new contexts, with new topics.

8

Where do you most find yourself at odds with him?

I’m simply grateful that his works exist. At a time in which literary writing is so invisible, so little part of cultural awareness, so lost in the clamour of media babble, Bernhard’s literary extremity, his literary art of hyperbole, his literary megaphone breaks through, makes literature audible.

9

How is Bernhard regarded in your country?

His work is deeply neglected, unfortunately, even among literary critics. This is a serious omission, because so much of contemporary writing, even in English, is hard to appreciate without a knowledge of his work. Why is that the case? Is it too stylistically extreme? Is it perceived as being too demanding for the reader? Perhaps.

A personal note. Reviewers only occasionally pick up the influence of Bernhard in my own writing. Sometimes, they claim I’m a failed Martin Amis or Julian Barnes and instruct me on how to learn better from these British authors (ess repetition! Less naysaying!) I have to remind myself of William Burroughs’s sage advice: the writer should not ‘charge the cloth’ waved before him by the critic-matador. Even so, I’ve tweeted ‘read Thomas Bernhard!’ at a reviewer or two.

10

Do you see parallels between the social and political conditions in your country and those depicted in Bernhard’s work?

As I wrote in answer to a question above, Bernhard’s literary transvaluation need not concern only Austro-German Nazism and its cover-up. Aliterary descendent of the Bernhardian narrator might revel in writing against our ‘achievement society’.

11

Bernhard once insisted that literature should »radiate… not only worldwide, but universally«. In what ways does his work achieve this?

Bernhard has been for many years a world-author. It is necessary to write of the Bernhard-effect, of Bernhardism, of a Bernhardian contagion – even a plague: of a Bernharding event in literature in and across many languages.

12

If you had the chance to spend a day with Thomas Bernhard, what would it look like? We’d hang out in one of his farmhouses and listen to Prince, of course.