WGS: Yes, the study of nature in all its forms. The walker’s approach to viewing nature is a phenomenological one and the scientist’s approach is a much more incisive one, but they all belong together. And in my view, even today it is true that scientists very frequently write better than novelists. So I tend to read scientists by preference almost, and I’ve always found them a great source of inspiration. It doesn’t matter particularly whether they’re eighteenth-century scientists — Humboldt — or someone contemporary like Rupert Sheldrake. These are all very close to me, and people without whom I couldn’t pursue my work.
MS: It seems that in Austerlitz, even more so than in the other books, there is a ghostly prose. Dust laden, mist laden, penetrated by odd and misdirecting lights. . as if the attempt here is really to become lost in a fog.
WGS: Yes, well, these kinds of natural phenomena like fog, like mist, which render the environment and one’s ability to see it almost impossible, have always interested me greatly. One of the great strokes of genius in standard nineteenth-century fiction, I always thought, was the fog in Bleak House. This ability to make of one natural phenomenon a thread that runs through a whole text and then kind of upholds this extended metaphor is something that I find very, very attractive in a writer.
MS: It seems to me that this book is truly the first to pay extended stylistic respects to the writer who, it’s been said, has been your mentor and model, Thomas Bernhard. I wondered, was it after three books that one felt comfortable in creating a work that could be compared to the writing of a master and a mentor?
WGS: Yes, I was always, as it were, tempted to declare openly from quite early on my great debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard. But I was also conscious of the fact that one oughtn’t to do that too openly, because then immediately one gets put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhard, a follower of Thomas Bernhard, etc., and these labels never go away. Once one has them they stay with one. But nevertheless, it was necessary for me eventually to acknowledge his constant presence, as it were, by my side. What Thomas Bernhard did to postwar fiction writing in the German language was to bring to it a new radicality which didn’t exist before, which wasn’t compromised in any sense. Much of German prose fiction writing, of the fifties certainly, but of the sixties and seventies also, is severely compromised, morally compromised, and because of that, aesthetically frequently insufficient. And Thomas Bernhard was in quite a different league because he occupied a position which was absolute. Which had to do with the fact that he was mortally ill since late adolescence and knew that any day the knock could come at the door. And so he took the liberty which other writers shied away from taking. And what he achieved, I think, was also to move away from the standard pattern of the standard novel. He only tells you in his books what he heard from others. So he invented, as it were, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. You’re always sure that what he tells you is related, at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. That appealed to me very much, because this notion of the omniscient narrator who pushes around the flats on the stage of the novel, you know, cranks things up on page three and moves them along on page four and one sees him constantly working behind the scenes, is something that I think one can’t do very easily any longer. So Bernhard, single-handedly I think, invented a new form of narrating which appealed to me from the start.
MS: It’s not only a new form of narrating. It’s a new form of making things stop in space. Because the Bernhard works are often composed in one long paragraph, sometimes in one long sentence, if I’m not mistaken. The effect is of a dream, of being spoken to in a dream, and your attention can’t help but flicker in and out. You can move back a page or two and discover the very careful links of the chain. But the intensity has been so nonstop that it’s almost as if it breaks the mind’s attempt to hold it in a chain.
WGS: Yes, it is that. Bernhard’s mode of telling a tale is related to all manner of things, not least the theatrical monologue. In the early book that bears the English title Gargoyles and in German is called Die Verstörung, the whole of the second part is the monologue of the Prince of Salla, and it would make a wonderful piece on the stage. So it has the intensity, the presence that one can experience in the theater — he brings that to fiction.
MS: I’ve been very amused because critics of your work in America seem to be bewildered by its tone, and I don’t, in fact, find its tone bewildering. I think they are unfamiliar with it because of its tenderness, a tenderness brought to bear on subjects that have usually compelled indignation, scorn, and, certainly in Beckett and in Bernhard, a huge and glittering kind of contempt or scorn. Here it really has that quality of — am I wrong here? — of infinite care taken in listening to speakers who are not being reviled in the slightest.
WGS: Yes. I don’t know where it quite comes from, but I do like to listen to people who have been sidelined for one reason or another. Because in my experience once they begin to talk, they have things to tell you that you won’t be able to get from anywhere else. And I felt that need of being able to listen to people telling me things from very early on, not least I think because I grew up in postwar Germany where there was — I say this quite often — something like a conspiracy of silence, i.e., your parents never told you anything about their experiences because there was at the very least a great deal of shame attached to these experiences. So one kept them under lock and seal. And I for one doubt that my mother and father, even amongst themselves, ever broached any of these subjects. There wasn’t a written or spoken agreement about these things. It was a tacit agreement. It was something that was never touched on. So I’ve always. . I’ve grown up feeling that there is some sort of emptiness somewhere that needs to be filled by accounts from witnesses one can trust. And once I started. . I would never have encountered these witnesses if I hadn’t left my native country at the age of twenty, because the people who could tell you the truth, or something at least approximating the truth, did not exist in that country any longer. But one could find them in Manchester and in Leeds or in North London or in Paris — in various places, Belgium and so on.
MS: I find it almost spooky how frequently these critics — I guess expecting the austerities and harshnesses of certain postwar prose — don’t see that this is characterized by tenderness, bewilderment, horror, infinite pity, and a kind of almost willed self-mortification. That is, I am willing to hear and place great acts of attention on all things with the chance and hope that revelation will occur.
WGS: Well, I suppose if there is such a thing as a revelation, if there can be a moment in a text which is surrounded by something like claritas, veritas, and the other facets that qualify epiphanies, then it can be achieved only by actually going to certain places, by looking, by expending great amounts of time in actually exposing oneself to places that no one else goes to. These can be backyards in cities, they can be places like that fortress of Breendonk in Austerlitz. I had read about Breendonk before, in connection with Jean Améry. But the difference is staggering, you know — whether you’ve just read about it or whether you actually go and spend several days in and around there to see what these things are actually like.
MS: It was once explained to me that there was in German prose something called das Glück im Winkel, happiness in a corner. I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world. So that a completely or newly forgotten prose tone is being brought into the postmodern century, and the extraordinary echo, the almost immediate abyss that opens between the prose and the subject, is what results. Automatically, ghosts, echoes, trance states — it’s almost as if you are allowing the world to howl into the seashell of this prose style.