Contrastación del resultado del trabajo de campo.

40 into the centre of literary debate, in a way unequalled by any of the other Graz and Vienna writers of the 'fifties and 'sixties. Yet the "view from the madhouse “, to use the term which Ziolkowski (1969) had employed to characterise the predominant perspective of early 'sixties German writing, re-emerged in Handke's work - in the

SprechstUcke, most notably Publikumsbeschimpfung. in which the conventions of

theatre-going were attacked (although somehow in a more "orderly" way than in much of the radical and avant-garde drama of the late 'sixties - the audience may have been "insulted" by the language of the play, but at least they were not humiliated or physically assaulted by the actors^^), and Kaspar. in which social conditioning by means of linguistic norms is questioned. Then, when Handke turned to prose writing, the typical central chai acter of his 1970s writings tended to show "abnormal" tendencies - Bloch, in Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter. commits a seemingly motiveless murder and shows traces of schizophrenia, Keuschnig in Die Stunde der wahren Empfindung transfomis his life in a way which seems to take little account of the feelings of those around him, to take but two examples. What these characters imply is not necessarily - as implied by some of the Surrealists, or by the "anti-psychiatry" fashionable in the "sixties - that the world, or society, is insane, and that therefore the insane are the only people who have real insight into the true state of things ; but that pre-ordained, "conventional" ways of seeing can dull our perceptions, and that "moments of true feeling", be they epiphanies or shocks, can enable one to overcome this - it will be remembered that Handke'a attack on the literature read at the Princeton Gruppe 47 meeting took issue with its "Beschreibungsimpotenz". This statement could be said to have created the required shock effect, as the silence of many of the older generation, during the intensely politicised late 'sixties was followed by the so-called

Tendenzwende , in which a move towards more introspective writing and an

abandonment of the Utopian revolutionism of the Student Movement were apparent.

Indeed, Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971 reflects the disorientation felt by some older writers during the period in question. The author seems to feel challenged in his familiar role as political liberal and cultural critic, not merely by the process of ageing and the awareness of mortality which haunts the book (and which is familial* from, e.g., the Faber-Sabeth relationship in Homo faberl but by the fact that so many of the world events to which he gives his attention seem to be completely outwith his control. In contrast to the Tagebuch 1946-1949. which is much more the journal of an author who knows that his audience will be drawn from his contemporaries and who is the direct witness of current events, Frisch here, despite the fact that his travels take him to the USA, Japan and the USSR, obtains much of his information second-hand, mediated through the means of reproduction - newspapers, radio and television - which had been cited as a source of inauthenticity in Stiller. Furthermore, there is the presence of a younger generation with whom Frisch sympathises, to a certain extent, but whom he cannot completely understand or identify with - as the somewhat awkward conversations with students make plain (e.g. 341-344). The author retains his curiosity about contemporary events : during his stay in the United States, this ranges from a lunch at the White House with Henry Kissinger (290-307), to further encounters with students and black Americans (including a visit to Harlem's Apollo Theater) and, perhaps surprisingly, attendance at a concert in the most celebrated rock music venue of the time, the Fillmore Auditorium, where the performance is interrupted by a bomb alert (374). Even so, it is easier to imagine a Handke or a Brinkmann in such surroundings ; Frisch's Tagebuch 1966-1971 , therefore, illustrates both the "generation gap" of the time and, in its more reflective passages, the introspective tendencies which were to play a major role in the 1970s.

One of Handke "s early essays was entitled "Als ich Verstdrung von

Thomas Bernhard las" It indicated a strong affinity between Handke and his fellow

Austrian, even though Bernhard was a dozen years older than Handke and came from

42 a very different social background; he was a product of the traditional, cultured and Catholic bourgeoisie of Salzburg, while Handke spent most of his childhood in poverty in rural Kârnten. Bernhard's first novels Frost (1963) and Verstorung (19671 again take up the "view from the madhouse" - this time, by focusing on central characters of exceptional ability who have nonetheless been unable to reconcile themselves to the modern world and as a consequence live alone and in despair in remote Austrian landscapes whose atmosphere seems to reflect their doom-laden thoughts. This was to become a kind of "trademark" of Bernhard's writing - the theme of the failed genius battling intensely and heroically against a society chai'acterised by mediocrity and attempting to resist the all-pervasive influence of an indifferent, decaying natural world. Bernhai'd's movement from music to literature, from association with the avant-garde composer Gerhard Lampersberg at the beginning of his literary career in the 1950s, to a position in the 1980s as a kind of "court jester" of the Austrian Second Republic, was facilitated by a series of interventions in public affairs which often led to scandal and controversy. For him, the problems of self-definition appeared to be inextricably bound up with the countiy in which he lived ; his "Habliebe" for his homeland was expressed both in his public statements, often bitterly critical of Austrian institutions and politicians, and in his fictional writing, in which he portrays the influence - usually malevolent - of the rural landscapes of the country on the psychological condition of his characters. His standing in German cultural life fluctuated too, views on his significance varying from adulation to dismissal. Some regarded him as a genuinely "great" writer, others as

? little more than a kind of Austrian Spike Milligan, a psychologically vulnerable

proponent of a tragi-comic. Goon Show-like humour which spilled over into the grotesque, a tendency most obvious in his plays but regarded by some critics as marring his work in general. However, the most, challenging aspect of his work, the extremely repetitive and unconventional prose style, characterised by Bernhard himself as "musikalische Prosa" , registers an individual identity in quite a different manner from the simple re-telling of earlier experiences or straightforwaid expression of social

criticism. In the 1960s, Bernhard was, as an Austrian and a writer marked by influences from beyond the Federal Republic and the milieu of Gruppe 47, to some degree a "fringe" figure, identified with the Austrian avant-garde, if indeed with any particular g r o up i n g ^ ! . Yet in the 1970s and "80s he was gradually to achieve

recognition as a major writer of his era. His career and the reception of his work

provide an intriguing reflection of the changes in the literary and cultural climate of i Germany and Austria , revealing unexpected correspondences between the political

and the personal - and, as the chapter on Bernhard will show, in a way strikingly different from that favoured by those of his contemporaries associated with the generation of 1968. In fact his work seems to provoke a response which cannot be easily pigeon-holed by means of politically-inspired criteria of judgement, and thus to foreshadow that change in the critical climate which was to occur in the 1970s and 1980s ; the stylistic mixture of tradition and modernism, the alternation of realistic description and rhetorical exaggeration, the ambiguous relationship to literaiy and philosophical forebeai's, the deeply-troubled relationship of the central characters to their world all serve to illustrate the increasing difficulty of categorising literature as

merely "conservative" or "progressive" ; a problem which will recur in the chapters # devoted to Frisch, Handke and Bernhard, and will be considered in more detail in

Chapter 5 of this study.

6t He was, for a short time, associated with the Wiener Gruppe ; see H.C. Artmann’s “Ein schreckliches Theaterstiick”, in his Im Schatten der Burenwurst. Skizzen ans Wien (Munich

1986), 41-43, with its comic account of the première of a play, “Rosen und Einwande” (a title recalling Bernhard’s 1959 die rosen der einode. fünf satze für ballett. stimmen und orchesterl bv “Thomas Herrenbart” in a small Vienna theatre which also presented works by the likes of “Oswald Prager” and “Conny F. Bayer”.

44

CHAPTER TWO