Über die Funktion des Schreibens bei Thomas Bernhard

This paper addresses the problem of the act of writing from a phenomenologically inspired point of view and should not, because of its claim to question the very essence of the decision to write, be read as an exhaustive literary interpretation. We will not only demonstrate how Thomas Bernhard’s autobiographical writings – as a self-portrait of the writer – can provide a somewhat unusual answer to the question of why one writes, but we will also show that it is possible and even enriching to interpret his autobiographical works from this philosophical angle. The act of writing lies at the very basis of literary creation and cannot, as an expression of our radical phenomenological essence in a Henryan way, be postulated as a simple and unquestionable happening. We would like to point out how the idea of a life-determining decision underlies Bernhard’s thinking and how his writing can be seen as an attempt to solve etiologically the question of his origins as a writer, but also as a human being. In our analysis of the first four autobiographical writings, we will point out the splitting of the structure into “I” and “the young boy” and try to articulate the two levels of narration with each other in order to make clear the parallels between the writing subject and the object “writer” in the course of the narration. This constant mirror-play between the two levels will reveal Bernhard’s writing as an attempt to write out of a self-searched isolation (from the readers) against this isolation, the senselessness and needlessness of his own existence as a writer. Finally, it is our concern to present to the reader a writing of a different kind – mathematical in its method, without any desire to find the truth, and highly subjective in its interpretation of events – that becomes an “art of survival” for the author himself.