Thomas Bernhard

Whatever you write it's always a catastrophe. That's the depressing thing about the fate of a writer . . . All you deliver is a bad, ridiculous copy of what you had imagined . . . It's especially hard in the German language, because that language is wooden, clumsy, disgusting. A terrible language that kills anything light and wonderful. The only thing one can do is sublimate that language with a rhythm to give it musicality.

A Party For Boris - Closing

The Oldest Cripple
Boris
Cripple shakes Boris several times
All look at Boris
Johanna suddenly
He's dead
screaming
He's dead
to The Good Woman
He's dead
Boris is dead
exeunt All with the exception of The Good Woman, either wheeling themselves in their wheelchairs or being wheeled in silence by the attendants and waiters and backing out of the room. Hardly is The Good Woman alone with Boris's corpse when she bursts into horrible peals of laughter.

THE END

A Party For Boris

The Oldest Cripple to The Good Woman
We keep asking ourselves
what form of suicide
would be most bearable for us
Cripple
Always with what
and how to do it
Cripple
with our bed sheets
with our pocket knives
Cripple
with the kitchen knives
Cripple
or jump out of the window

A Party For Boris

The Great Woman
We have gone among the apes
The Queen went about among the apes
accompanied by a pig
I am tired
Wheel me back to where I was

A Party For Boris -

Then you asked me whether my husband
had said anything before he died
Your brutal frankness
In your morbid way
you wanted to find out details
My husband was killed instantly
I was not killed
But my husband was killed instantly
my legs were gone

A Party For Boris

No one has time for letters
For ideas
it is true that people have no ideas
because they have no time
for ideas
and they have no time
because they have no ideas
nobody likes to live like a specter
I have the most time
and I have no time at all
that is my misfortune

A Party For Boris - Opening

First Prologue

Empty room, high windows and doors
The Good Woman right
Johanna enters from left with a table and places it by The Good Woman
The Good Woman
It's cold
Johanna moves the table still closer to The Good Woman and places herself behind her
The Good Woman
Heavens it's cold
Bring me the blanket

THOMAS BERNHARD (1931-89) was a playwright, poet, and novelist whose prestigious literary prizes include the Austrian State Prize, the Buchner Prize, the Bremen Prize, and Le Priz Seguier. His novels Woodcutters, Concrete, Gargoyles, and The Lime Works are also available in English translation from the University of Chicago Press. KENNETH NORTHCOTT is professor emeritus in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. PETER K. JANSEN is associate professor of German at the University of Chicago.

The three plays in this volume were originally published in three separate volumes as Ein Fest Fur Boris(1968), Ritter, Dene, Voss(1984), and Der Theatermacher (1984) by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.


The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
1990 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 1990
Printed in the United States of America



The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences -- Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48--1984

Frost - pg. 311

Because, like all humans, you aren't able to identify your moment. Nothing identifies its moment, that's it! ... where there's a precipitate fall or climb, you don't know ... where it goes down into the practice of letting live and vegetating along.

Frost - pg. 309

"...And then there's the additional factor that incipient thoughts bat around the inside of my skull; each time, I think my head will break apart when I move from one subject to another. There is a continual imaginative assault, which is driving me half crazy. You must remember, no one has such self-restraint. Every object I see hurts me. Every color I am force3d to take in. Every memory that surfaces, everything, everything. There isn't anything I can look at till the end, because I would either be wiped out or driven crazy, in the way that everything strikes me as being so crazy already, that I'm like a cursed animal, do you understand! I've already crossed the line ..."

Frost - pg. 303

Once changed, he hunkered in the hallway and read to me from his Pascal. It was always "about the whole tragedy," he said, I didn't understand what he meant by that. Always about "a single coarse act." He said: "Factor in lethality." And: "Death renders everything infamous." He was continually leaving, only to get out at some city of thought, interrupting his journey he had a destination "that would permit of no arrival, that discourages any arrival." I went up to my room and said to myself, but aloud, so that it bounced off the walls and its echo struck me: "I can't stand any more of this!" I lay down. I leafed through my Henry James, without giving the writer a thought. Walked to and fro. Lay down again.

Frost - pg. 300

I could clearly see the butchers' fleeing footprints. One could see also the tracks of the livestock they had stolen. One could see the darkness of the planets, and the low proletarianism of murder.

Frost - pg. 293

It was possible to drift on a raft with other people for years and years, pressed together, body against body, in a tiny space, without coming to know those people any better. "The darkness around one must be equal at moments to the darkness later on, that turns to stone inside us, at the end. Petrifies our blood, like the veins in marble."

Frost - pg. 288

"There is no state. The state is impossible. There has never been a state." As far as our own state was concerned, then, aside from the fact that it wasn't a state ("no longer a state!"), it was something as ridiculous as a "squeaking little rhesus monkey in a big zoo," in which, naturally enough, only the well-fed and beautiful specimens of lions and tigers and leopards attracted any interest: it was their roaring. Only roaring counted, squeaking was ridiculous! It was "only the great roaring" that counted! The squeaking would be roared down! The great roaring will roar down the ridiculous squeaking! Out head of state was a "co-op manager" our chancellor "a market-day brothel attendant." The people had the choice of butchers, apprentice electricians, dully blown-up waistcoat wearers, between grave-robbers and grave-robbers' assistants. Democracy, "our democracy," was the biggest swindle. Our country sat heavily in Europe's gut, completely indigestible, like an "ill-advisedly swallowed clubfoot."

Frost - pg. 275

"...Truth is always a process of extermination, you must understand. Truth leads downhill, points downhill, truth is always an abyss. Untruth is a climbing, an up, untruth is no death, as truth is death, untruth is no abyss, but untruth is not A-truth, you understand: the great infirmities do not approach us from outside, the great infirmities have been within us, surprisingly, for millions of years ..."

Frost - pg. 237

"... Yes, the man who keeps them is not allowed to think ... Woman is a destroyer, she's not capable of friendship ... They're made for marriage and children, the only moment they stop lying is when they're giving birth ... Women are for bedding, and nothing more. A woman has no sense of humor. She's the devil's tool, and she's responsible for the tragedy of humankind."

Frost - pg. 235

"The nearness of a person produces in one the desire to know him to that point where he ceases to exist for oneself. That's how it is with people."

Frost - pg. 211

Eighteenth Day

"I could drill through my boots, you know that? I could. But I don't want to. I've got the strength. But I'm not going to drill through my boots. It would be a pointless waste of strength."

Frost - pg. 171

And the Graben is lit up at Christmastime, and people bump into each other, and everyone feels glad to be alive. Sometimes you might shiver a little to be standing all alone in the midst of so many people, but then you think of your bed, and you don't feel sad anymore.

Frost - pg. 163

Listen, these tragedians, listen to them: the monstrously unappetizing republic of all-powerful idiocy, listen to them: this unsolicited shameless parliament of hypocrites ... There are the dogs, there is their yap, there is death, death in all its wild profusion, death with all its frailty, death with its stink of quotidian crime, death, this last recourse of despair, the bacillus of monstrous unendingness, the death of history, the death of impoverishment, death, listen, the death that I don't want, that no one wants, that no one wants anymore, there it is, death, the yap, listen, the unlawful drowning of reason, the refusal to give evidence of all supposition, the spastic smack of soft brain on concrete, on the concrete floor of human dementia ... Listen to my views on the yap, listen ... I want to try and plumb the thinking of the infernal tempest, the confusion of eras, Cambrian, Silurian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic, the monstrous Tertiary and Quaternary, the monstrously meaningless rejection of the great floods licking up from the depths ... Listen to me, I am going into the yap, I go in and I smash their fangs, I yell it with the thunder of my unreasonableness, I scramble its processes, its mendacious propaganda ... Listen, stop, listen, the seating stupid slavering dogs' tongues, listen to the dogs, listen to them, listen to them ..."

Frost - pg. 143

"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy ... Envy is what hold artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything ... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions ... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very greatest emetics ... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum? The infernality of unscrupulousness is something I always meet with in the thoughts of artists ... But I don't want any artists' anymore, no more of those unnatural thoughts, I want nothing more to do with artists or with art, yes, not with art either, that greatest of all abortions ... Do you understand: I want to get right away from that bad smell. Get away from that stink, I always say to myself, and secretly I always thought, get away from that corrosive, shredding, useless lie, get away from that shameless simony ..." He said: "Artists are the identical twins of hypocrisy, the identical twins of low-mindedness, the identical twins of licensed exploitation, the greatest licensed exploitation of all time. Artists, as they have shown themselves to me to be," he said, " are all dull and grandiloquent, nothing but dull and grandiloquent, nothing ..."