The Unconscionable Critic: Thomas Bernhard's Holzfällen
Date
2011-07-14
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Abstract
Through a reading of Holzfällen, this essay seeks to address a persistent problem in the work of Thomas Bernhard: the curious divergence of critique and rational argument. The novel presents a series of scornful attacks on a variety of people, places, objects, and activities, but consistently withholds reasoned explanations, thus precluding any possible agreement with or acceptance of the views expressed in it. Scholars have proved unable to reconcile the unfairness, exaggeration, and disparateness of the narrator's claims with the novel's critical framework. By examining the discourse of affect in Holzfällen, the authors argue that it presents a form of critique whose central principle is the maintenance of social distance. The narrator wants neither to persuade nor to reform others, but rather to describe and enact a process of disentanglement and departure. © 2011 Modern Austrian Literature and Culture Association.
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Jakob Norberg
Jakob Norberg’s research explores conceptions of community in German thought and literature. His first book, Sociability and Its Enemies (Northwestern 2014), examines the search for non-authoritarian forms of collective life after the end of the Second World War and focuses on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and Jürgen Habermas. The second book, The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism (Cambridge UP 2022), shows how Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm viewed philologists as arbiters of national identity, even adjudicators of national territory, and therefore as experts indispensable to the modern nation state. The third book entitled Schopenhauer’s Politics (Cambridge UP, 2024) reconstructs Arthur Schopenhauer’s anti-nationalist, anti-collectivist political philosophy. His articles have appeared in venues such as PMLA, Arcadia, Cultural Critique, New German Critique, Textual Practice, Telos, and the Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. More information about Norberg can be found on academia.edu.
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