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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. Only today has he broken that routine—Reger invited Atzbacher to meet with him in the Bordone room after having been to the museum the previous day, for reasons unknown to Atzbacher. This move appears ominous, especially in light of the recent death of Reger's wife, of which we learn later. Atzbacher fears that Reger may want to kill himself. In fact, although Reger had wanted to kill himself after his wife died (but didn't—he was too cowardly, and then the moment passed) the ultimate reason is less sinister and actually rather funny. I won't give it away, out of consideration for those of you who haven't read the novel and might still want to.
The novel is told from the perspective of Atzbacher, although his thoughts and observations at times blend with Reger's thoughts and observations, as he tells the reader what Reger told him at various times in the past, so that it is not always straightforward whose perspective is given. In terms of content, the novel is a mosaic of borderline and actual rants about the deficiencies of Austria at the time, of Austrians themselves, people visiting museums, art historians (who are treated most ruthlessly), philosophers, writers, and so on, all of whom are treated with scorn and called out for their hypocrisy, mendaciousness, kitschiness, and so forth. To give one example, Heidegger is lampooned and scathingly attacked by Reger as a philosopher who "has always been repulsive to me, not only the night-cap on his head and his homespun winter long-johns above the stove which he himself had lit at Todtnauberg, not only his Black Forest walking stick which he himself had whittled, in fact his entire hand-whittled Black Forest philosophy, everything about that tragicomic man … has always profoundly repulsed me whenever I even thought of it." To really stick in the knife, he goes on: "When I think that even super-intelligent people have been taken by Heidegger and that even one of my best women friends wrote a dissertation about Heidegger, and moreover wrote that dissertation quite seriously [emphasis in the original], I feel sick to this day." You'll find similar material about other writers and artists, especially of Bernhard's day. Depending on your taste, you'll laugh at it or find it altogether off-putting (this probably holds for reading Bernhard's work more generally, although you won't always laugh). Interesting as these 'attacks' are, I want to get at the current beneath them.
In particular, I want to focus first on two observations by Reger that center on what you might call, echoing John Berger, ways of seeing. That these observations concern ways of seeing is perhaps not immediately obvious; nor is the connection between the two. But, as I will show, the two observations are really variations on a theme: subjectivity. That the novel centers on (quite literally) a work of art—Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man—is no coincidence. There are few areas in which the relation between subjectivity and objectivity is more relevant and hotly debated than in the field of fine art (it is probably only in some areas of philosophy that the matter is more central). Think of the question of whether there is such a thing as objective beauty, so that, if Object X is beautiful, everyone will find it beautiful—compared to the by-now cliché that beauty, perhaps even everything, is subjective, so that the most one can say is that I find Object X beautiful. I will relate these two points to a third and final one, related to a way of seeing more indirectly, but one that is crucial to the novel.
First, speaking of the old masters, Reger eventually points out that everything is flawed (he begins, in Bernhardian fashion, by pointing out the particular paintings that he dislikes and thinks are flawed, and then widens the circle of his criticism to include all paintings and, indeed, all art). When you really look at something, when you examine anything critically, you will always find some flaw. Even the greatest works of art are found, upon close and careful examination, to have flaws—whether it is a nose that isn't quite perfectly drawn, a brushstroke that, upon reflection, don't quite belong, or a segue that is not exactly in the right place. Not just art is flawed—everything is. Of course, to some extent this depends on how you view it. You could say that a painting like Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man must be seen from a distance, to be taken in as a whole. By viewing it up close and seeing the individual brushstrokes, the effect of the painting may be diminished. More than this more banal observation, however, it may be that the flaw resides not in the painting, but in the viewer. In fact, it may be Reger, flaw-seeking, flaw-finding Reger, who imposes his flaw-perception on the works of art or on whatever he throws his flaw-perceiving attention. We may follow him quite far, we may agree that Klimt is kitsch and so on, but there may be a limit where genuine flaws exists—there may be a point at which it the flaw itself loses primacy to the flaw-finding. Or, better yet, to the flaw-finder. To Reger, or whoever else is motivated to find flaws.
The only exception that Reger admits to everything being flawed, is nature itself. But then nature, at its heart, is what may be called a 'given'. It is the backdrop to everything else, the condition for the existence of everything else. It is not manipulated (although of course we manipulate many, if not virtually all, aspects of nature). Most importantly, nature is the view from nowhere—it cannot detect flaws, and, conversely, it cannot have flaws, because flaws are intimately related to intentionality. And unless you have a teleological view of nature (that nature has a purpose, is moving towards something) then nature has no intention. It cannot make mistakes, because mistakes arise out of a misalignments between what one wanted to do/should have done/ought to do and how things actually turn out. In this respect, Reger may be said to be playing a guessing game—his claim is to know how things ought to be. Again, we may follow along with him (and Bernhard, for that matter), but there will be a limit. We may see things differently at some point. As long as we grant authority to his subjectivity, so long as we are tempted to see that subjectivity as objectivity, we will see flaws as he sees them. But it may be otherwise, and we have to remember this.
Second, Reger, again beginning by pointing out the ridiculousness of particular works of arts, ends up with a page-long monologue about everything being ridiculous when you really think about it. Even the highest forms of art, the works of the very greatest writers—Shakespeare and Goethe—become ridiculous when you really think about them. Reger suggest that to truly understand one of these works, even a work of philosophy by Kant or Schopenhauer, you should read only a single line very, very carefully. People read these works and they read over so much that they never end up understanding a work fully. Of course, this is not to be taken literally. However, it tells us something important. This idea is again related to ways of seeing—like seeing a work of art up close (which, arguably, is meant to be seen in its entirety) and finding flaws, so, in reverse fashion, one may take a work of philosophy or literature, which arguably has to be understood as a whole as well (especially a philosophical system), and find not its flaws, but rather its essence. Perhaps it is only when we look at the building blocks, so to speak, that we find no flaws. The meaning, the essence, the purity is in the minutiae.
In the end, then, perhaps things themselves are not flawed; instead, the flaw is in our way of seeing. One will always find a flaw when one wants to see one. There is a double layer of irony in the dynamic of Reger's criticism. First, Reger takes his own observations entirely seriously, while the reader (and perhaps Atzbacher as well) is unlikely to accept them all, even if she might be seduced into accepting most. The perceptive reader realizes, at various points throughout the novel, the source—the psychological motivation—behind Reger's observations. The perceptive reader links the death of Reger's wife due to, as Reger puts it, the negligence of the state, the Catholic Church, the hospital, and so on, to Reger's immense hatred for these same institutions (his wife died after she fell at the entrance to the museum, and was later incorrectly operated on at the local hospital). If not enough to reduce the first to the latter—because Reger does provide arguments for many of his claims—there is at least a suspicion, and a grounded suspicion, that the special venom in the observations is motivated by a source that is personal and emotional rather than objective and intellectual. This brings us close to something that is known as motivated reasoning in psychology. The term has various meanings, some more technical and subtle than others, but roughly it is the psychological mechanism by which people, when they are motivated to believe something (that is, when they want something to be a certain way) will find reasons for it to be so. We ignore incongruent evidence, for instance, at the cost of inaccuracy but to the benefit of being able to keep our worldview intact. Rather than motivated reasoning, however, we might say that Reger is engaging in motivated seeing when he sits on his settee in front of Tintoretto's White-Bearded Man. The question is, of course, whether there is such a thing as non-motivated seeing (or reasoning)—which is at the heart of debates about subjectivity in art and philosophy.
At the same time, what Bernhard wants to do above all, or so it seems to me, is to show up people's complacency. He sees mendaciousness and kitschiness and pettiness all around him (and even within himself, I would say) and it bothers him immensely. The only way to rise above this mendaciousness and kitschiness and pettiness is to ruthlessly (a word Bernhard is fond of using and italicizing) identify the jarring objects and sources, to lay them bare, to expose them—both in society and the behavior of other human beings, as well is in oneself. Through Reger, through Reger through Bernhard, we see ourselves—if we're reflective and self-critical enough. The challenge is to decide what to reject and what to accept.
Taken together, both points raised by Reger say something—beyond whatever they say about their objects—about human motivation; they highlight a kind of looking at the world in a certain way, or what is broadly known as subjectivity. Thomas Bernhard's work generally is marked by this subjectivity—he almost always speaks entirely through his characters. The distinction between the German Erfahrung and Erlebnis, or, respectively and roughly, experience and lived experience, seems to suffuse Bernhard's works in this way. Experience is supposed to be more or less objective, in the sense that it can be shared among people. It can be said to be intersubjective, whereas lived experience is tied to the unique being of a person (their individual background, personality, and so on). In Bernhard we find a fascinating interplay between the two: so many of his characters' ramblings and denunciations we follow, but only up to a point. At that point, we realize that there is something about the characters' being, or lived experiences—and perhaps above all Bernhard's—that, no matter in how many ways and at what length it is said, cannot be translated to us (the reader). We find ourselves imagining ourselves in a Bernhard novel, and we just know that we wouldn't have the same thoughts, the same anxieties, and so on. I think that Bernhard knows this all too well.
The third and final point involves the death of Reger's wife, and how he responds to it. While at first ambivalent about women generally and the woman who would be his wife in particular, he quickly grew accustomed to her and, in short, she became his companion for thirty years. She would even come to the museum with him every other day for thirty years. Reflecting on her death to Atzbacher, Reger says: "Of course we get used to a person over the decades and eventually love them more than anything else and cling to them and when we lose them it is truly as if we had lost everything. I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or altogether that it was simply art, but none of it, the whole of art or whatever, is nothing compared to that one beloved person." We get another perspective, behind Reger—that of his wife. Reger recounts how the two of them would read books together for hours: "through those journeys of the mind, on which I accompanied her, we travelled through Schopenhauer and through Nietzsche and through Descartes and through Montaigne and through Pascal, and always for several years." He tells the story in a patronizing way, as one of having had to introduce his wife to great writers and philosophy. However, without denying the condescending way in which Reger at times talks about his wife (which honestly can be little grating), there is no denying, I think, that whether or not he wants to admit it, during this time Reger not only did not read these works alone—he saw them with his wife. And he no longer is able to see them in the same way. As he admits, he could only read Schopenhauer after she died—and that after some time, after starving himself, and not in the way he used to, but by, as he describes it, abusing Schopenhauer for his own purposes, "by quite simply turning him into a prescription for survival." We do not know if Reger saw things differently before his wife died—but we have every reason to believe that he did.
I am reminded of what Camus writes in the preface to a collection of his plays: "At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone." This, in light of Bernhard via Reger, can be amended in the following way. At a certain level of suffering, nothing can do anything for anyone.
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If you want to read Old Masters, I recommend this edition published by the University of Chicago Press.
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