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Ways of Seeing: On Bernhard's Old Masters

July 16, 2019 in literature, philosophy, psychology

Thomas Bernhard's novel Old Masters, first published in 1985, consists—true to style—of a single paragraph. The plot is very minimal, as with most of Bernhard's works: the tutor Atzbacher (who is also, apparently, a philosopher, even though he has never published anything) has been summoned for a meeting by his elderly friend Reger at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. For thirty years, Reger has visited the so-called Bordone room, which houses Tintoretto's painting White-Bearded Man, every other day. Precisely every other day.

Perfectionism and Absurd Creation: Joseph Grand in Camus's The Plague

April 28, 2019 in literature, existentialism, absurdism

Albert Camus's novel The Plague, published in 1947, centers on the French-Algerian city of Oran, where thousands of rats are found dead in the streets. At first, only a few inhabitants take notice of this strange event—but soon, as the plague rushes through the city and begins to kill people, too, the nature and meaning of the disease can no longer be ignored. The Plague is probably my favorite novel by Camus; it ranks with other great existentialist/philosophical works of fiction, like Kafka's Trial, Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Sartre's Nausea, Dazai's No Longer Human, Malraux's Man's Fate, and so on.