Misanthropy? Moralizing. Cynicism (or, The Postmodern Preacher)

An essay on Thomas Bernhard, translated from the Serbian by Aleksandar B. Nedeljkovic

The words that Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) spoke and wrote against the Austrian political powerholders, his testamentary ban on his dramas being ever performed in his own native country, and - last, but not least - the amount of Thanatos that he "elaborated", led many observers to interpret his work as a definitive writing-out of a misanthropically, or at least nihilistic discourse. But if you want to point to a different ideological origin of his writing, you should examine his thought-system on which was founded the abovementioned judgement about misanthropicalness, and you should apply the internal criticism provided in that system itself. (We are about to offer an interpretation of a work on the basis of quasi-judgements passed in it; and we shall arrive at certain revelations; neither should be attributed to the personal taste of the author of this text.) We will not take into account Bernhard's public statements, because they may have been part of author's mystification, his media strategy, etc; the man's written works are, in all probability, the only valid object of that sort of interpretation. We will listen to the narrator's voice in his novels (we are trying not to be too voluminous here, so we shall only look at prose, not poetry), and we will listen carefully to the protagonists, because his hero-narrator is always a reduced variation of an "extreme character" who shares most of the author's interests and usually the opinions too.