Holzfällen Reading Order

Holzfällen (Woodcutters, 1984) by Thomas Bernhard is the purest example of the Bernhard voice — a narrator sitting in a wing chair at an artistic dinner party in Vienna, watching the assembled guests with a growing fury that he cannot stop describing in ever-intensifying circles, a long single monologue that spirals outward from the initial act of arriving at the dinner to a comprehensive indictment of the falsity of Viennese artistic culture, the corruption of the Austrian bourgeoisie, and his own complicity in having ever admired any of them. The occasion is a dinner thrown by Fritz and Jeannie Auersberger in honor of a Burgtheater actor; the narrator has not seen them in twenty years; the woman who killed herself that morning (Joana, an old friend) was going to attend the dinner before her death. Bernhard's prose works by accumulation: the same observations repeat and intensify, each repetition adding emphasis without adding information, until the fury achieves a kind of musical structure — a fugue of contempt. This technique is Bernhard's invention and it is absolutely distinctive; no other writer in German or any other language does what Bernhard does with obsessive repetition as a formal device. Woodcutters was immediately banned in Austria after publication because the Auersbergers were recognizable as real people; Bernhard was sued, and the ban was lifted only after he revised the dedication. He refused all compromise on the prose itself. The novel is one of the essential documents of Austrian self-hatred in literature, a tradition that runs from Kraus through Bernhard to Jelinek.