Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard

First published:Verstörung, 1967 (English translation, 1970)

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: After World War I

Locale: The Austrian Alps

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a student home from Leoben to visit his father
• The Doctor, the narrator’s father, a country doctor
• Prince Saurau, a mad patient

The Novel

Gargoyles chronicles a day in the life of an unnamed Austrian country doctor as he travels from patient to patient in the company of his son, an engineering student home for a visit. Although the son, who narrates the day’s events, remains an uninvolved observer, the stories of the people whom he watches his father treat reflect his own family’s alienation from one another. While the day’s journey could perhaps have provided both father and son with some understanding of each other, the book’s ending suggests that nothing will change.

The novel opens in the early morning as the father and son set off to treat an innkeeper’s wife who has been mortally wounded by a drunken miner in an early morning tavern brawl. As they ride in the innkeeper’s wagon, the father describes the life such people lead: one of anger, despair, and enslavement—a life that goes nowhere and provides no satisfaction or worthwhile human contact. Estrangement and betrayal are the fate of all the people in the doctor’s region. By the time the pair reaches the innkeeper’s wife, it is too late. The doctor’s only reaction is that, given the squalid nature of the woman’s marriage, murder was inevitable. This detachment sets the tone for the day’s visits.

Back on the road, the father and son discuss the death of the doctor’s wife, yet they never express their inner feelings about this woman. It becomes clear from the beginning that these two men do not know each other and probably never will. The next patient is a Frau Ebenhoh, a woman slowly dying of cancer and whose dull-witted son works in a tannery. Like the other patients in the novel, Frau Ebenhoh is estranged from her family, and she is convinced that her son and his wife will squander the inheritance that she will shortly leave him.

The doctor and his son next see a diabetic industrialist who lives in a decaying, empty hunting lodge, isolated from the rest of the world—except for his half-sister, with whom he conducts an incestuous relationship. Kept outside, the doctor’s son overhears the ravings of this crazed philosopher, who destroys every text he writes only to write each over again in search of the perfect statement concerning an undisclosed subject. When the doctor concludes this visit, the two men make their way up a narrow valley toward Hochgobernitz, the castle of Prince Saurau, stopping along the way to see more patients.

At a mill, the doctor looks in on an aging couple, the man ailing from gangrene, the woman immobilized by dropsy and incipient tuberculosis. Trapped in their fetid room with a Russian wolfhound that refuses to go outside without them, they oversee the workings of their mill. The doctor’s son stays outside, a witness to the equally bizarre events there: The couple’s sons and Turkish hired hand have been wringing the necks of dozens of exotic birds in an effort to silence their frenzied cries. It seems that the birds’ owner, the boys’ uncle, had died several weeks earlier, and since then the birds have been frantic, their cries becoming intolerable to the inhabitants of the mill. Creating a museum of stuffed, rare birds seems to be the only solution.

On the way out of the oppressive valley, the two men stop at the home of an incurable cripple, a gifted musician who had played the music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at the age of four but who is now a physically twisted, frenzied lunatic, confined to his room. His sister, also his caretaker, lives in the same room with him, a room filled with reminders of his lost promise: countless musical instruments as well as paintings of the composers whose works he used to play.

The final patient whom the doctor and his son see is Prince Saurau, whose fractured monologue takes up more than half of the book. Isolated within his castle, the prince is a prisoner of his delusions, hearing inaudible sounds and imagining impossible intrigues plotted against him. Perhaps the most important thing the narrator hears during this visit is the prince’s account of his ungrateful son, a student in London. Part truth and part nightmare, the prince’s story tells of his son’s plot to destroy his inheritance once the prince has died. The novel concludes as the two men prepare to leave for home; nothing is resolved.

The Characters

The narrator is a passive observer of his father’s interactions with patients and friends, yet the scenes that he has chosen to report tell the reader much about him, his family, and his relationship with his father. The world of which he gives readers a glimpse is one filled with grotesques, dying husbands and wives both physically and psychically deformed. Like the sons of the patients and of Prince Saurau, the doctor’s son is emotionally estranged from his father. The narrator believes that his “real” life is in Leoben, where he studies mining engineering; Prince Saurau’s son studies in London and refuses to come home.

The narrator has come home to try to establish a deeper contact with his father. To that end, he has written a letter—unacknowledged by the father—concerning the family’s inability to make contact with one another and proposing reasons why this should be so. His mother has wasted away and died, his sister makes frequent suicide attempts, and his father treats the sick but seems able to heal no one. It is clear that Bernhard intends for the events of the narrator’s journey to serve as a commentary on the narrator’s family as well as on the lives of the people whom the young man meets.

The father, a detached observer of those whom he treats, is mirrored in his insane double, Prince Saurau. Both men are disappointed in their children and see no hope either for reconciliation before their death or for compassionate understanding after they die. Yet neither seems able to speak directly to their sons, to express his fears or his hopes. The journey on which the doctor and his son go and the extended narrative of Prince Saurau serve as the only means by which the doctor can communicate his thoughts to his dispassionate son.

All the other characters reflect or share the same anxieties concerning their families, and all the people whom the doctor and his son visit on their day’s excursion live lives of crazed isolation, even when other members of their families are close at hand.

Critical Context

Gargoyles was Thomas Bernhard’s first novel and, in its bleak portrait of the human condition, closely resembles the work of Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, and Jean-Paul Sartre. In particular, Bernhard’s style is reminiscent of that of Kafka, whose settings were often the eternally depressing present of places, recognizable yet unfamiliar. Similar to the settings of these three authors, Bernhard’s landscapes are spare and gloomy, with the darkness originating from within the characters rather than emanating from the landscape itself. The tone of the fiction is one of menace, a menace that never fully manifests itself. The reader cannot identify this menace and, therefore, fails to deal with it satisfactorily; thus Bernhard increases the tension. He depicts a world whose barren landscape and lonely people are more horrifying because he demands that the reader see beyond a character’s immediate plight to the horror within, to the terror stemming from alienation, madness, and isolation—a spiritual condition explicitly identified in the novel’s German title, which means “derangement.”

While Gargoyles introduced the themes that have continued to obsess Bernhard throughout his career, this novel differs noticeably from his later works. The episodes prior to the encounter with Prince Saurau are darkly grotesque, yet they remain within the boundaries of conventional narrative, and the prince’s extended monologue is framed by the narrator’s comments (though in fact the prince has the last word). Bernhard’s later novels, in contrast, are monologues unbounded by any narrative frame; from the first sentence, one is in the grip of a relentless voice.

Bibliography

Domandi, Agnes, ed. “Thomas Bernhard,” in Modern German Literature, 1972.

Gamper, H. Thomas Bernhard, 1977.

Riley, Carolyn, ed. “Thomas Bernhard,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism. III (1975), pp. 64-65.

Schwedler, Wilfried. “Thomas Bernhard,” in Handbook of Austrian Literature, 1973. Edited by Frederick Ungar.

Sorg, B. Thomas Bernhard, 1977.