Gargoyles (novel)
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| - | "[[Raymond Aron]], als politiek filosoof van liberale snit de 20e eeuwse erfgenaam van [[Tocqueville]], noemde deze lucide observatie in zijn [[Plaidoyer pour l’Europe décadente]] (1977) ‘[[de wet van Tocqueville]]’. [[Karel van het Reve]] maakte een paar jaar later met deze ‘regel’ goede sier toen hij in zijn opstel ‘[[Het régime is niet gezond meer]]’ voorspelde dat de val van de Sovjet-dictatuur nabij was omdat het Moskouse bewind steeds lakser reageerde op de activiteiten van morrende dissidenten. Ruim tien jaar later kreeg hij gelijk."-- [[Ronald Havenaar]] https://www.wyniasweek.nl/de-revolutie-staat-nog-niet-voor-de-deur/ | + | '''''Gargoyles''''' is one of [[Thomas Bernhard]]’s earliest novels, which made the author known both nationally and internationally. Originally published in German in 1967, it’s a kaleidoscopic work, considered by critics his most disquieting and nihilistic. The German title, ''Verstörung'', translates as something like ''Confusion'' or ''Disturbance'', but the American publisher chose ''Gargoyles'', perhaps in order to render the array of human freaks the novel depicts to its very end. In fact, this is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity. |
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| - | [[The Intellectual Temptation: Dangerous Ideas in Politics]] | + | |
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| - | [[Frits Bolkestein]] · 2013 | + | |
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| - | They are [[Arend-Jan Boekestijn]], [[Diederik Boomsma]], [[Maarten Brands]], [[Christopher Caldwell]], [[Paul Cliteur]], [[Derk-Jan Eppink]], [[Paul Everard]], [[Meindert Eennema]], [[John Gillingham]], [[Caroline van der Graaf]], [[Arnold Heumakers]], [[Ayaan Hirsi Ali]], ... | + | |
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| - | [[Langs de afgrond]] | + | |
| - | Over fascisten gesproken. Ik las ‘Langs de afgrond’, een heerlijk boek. Het boek draagt als ondertitel, over het nut van foute denkers. Je vraagt je af of de schrijver Arnold Heumakers hier zijn eigen mening ventileert of probeert weer te geven wat zijn selectie van foute denkers in hun hersenspan omging. Het boek wijst op een aantal evidenties die vaak te weinig geapprecieerd worden. Namelijk ten eerste dat populisme slechts kan gedijen DANKZIJ de democratie, geen democratie, geen populisme. | + | |
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| - | Pagina 194: “zielige vluchtelingen.” | + | |
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| - | [[Nathalie Heinich]], kunstenaars als de nieuwe adel. Bejubeld, gelauwerd zolang ze de juiste meningen verkondigen, verguisd van zodra ze daar van afwijken in de stijl van [[Botho Strauss]], [[Peter Handke]] en [[Frans Kellendonk]]. | + | |
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| - | [[La jeune droite]], zat [[Blanchot]] daar bij?, Notre Dame wordt nog eens een moskee, schreef [[Cioran]], die ooit nog fan was van [[Codreanu]]. | + | |
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| - | Met wie zou je graag een nachtje op stap willen gaan? Met God of met de Duivel. Voor velen is de keuze snel gemaakt. | + | |
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| - | [[Jonathan Littell]] en [[Klaus Theweleit]], [[le sec et l’humide]], [[Raspail]] en de [[Big Other]], [[Hans Magnus Enzensberger]] [[Die grosse Wanderung]], [[Christopher Caldwell]], ''[[Reflections on the Revolution in Europe]]'', [[Getuigende kleding]] | + | |
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| - | P 250: vragen die zich niet een twee drie laten beantwoorden | + | |
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| - | Reich Kalifaat | + | |
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| - | [[Wet van Tocqueville]] | + | |
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| - | 255: “letterlijk vasthouden aan een universeel humanisme is geen optie meer” En de vraag jje af of Huemake hier de mening van zijn selectie of die van hemzelf verwoordt. Die van hemzelf, lijkt me. Ik verstop mij vaak achter mijn bronnen. Omdat ik vind dat er een totale gespletenheid in mij is, of om het met de woorden van [[Du Deffand]] te zeggen, een groot NIETS. | + | |
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| - | P 263: “dode hoek” | + | |
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| - | P 264, de onvermijdelijke [[Hume]]siaanse passies die in dit soort debatten naar boven komt, deze keer ook aangevuld met de ‘beelden’ van [[Gustave Le Bon]]. | + | |
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| - | [[Philipp Mainländer]], [[John Gabriel Stedman]] 1976 en [[George Floyd]], [[spijtwraak]]. | + | |
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| - | Mijn eerdere vaststelling bij het lezen van John Gray, of door het lezen van John Gray, dat we met zijn allen eigenlijk altijd maar een haarbreed van de barbarij verwijderd zijn. | + | |
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| - | [[David Benatar]] als [[antinatalist]]. | + | |
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| - | P 267: [[voetballerij]], homo’s, moslims, eerlijke vertegenwoordiging. Moeten er niet veel meer homo’s meevoetballen? | + | |
| - | Ontnuchtering, dat is wat AH wil. | + | ==Plot summary== |
| + | One morning a doctor takes his son—an idealistic student of science and rationality—on his daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the rural grotesques they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. But when they meet the insomniac Prince Saurau in his castle at Hochgobernitz, his solitary, stationary mind takes over the rest of the novel in an uninterrupted obsessive paragraph. It's a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid man, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard: the furious logorrhea is a mesmeric rant, completing the stylistic formation of his art of exaggeration, where he uses metaphors of physical and mental illness to explore the decay of his homeland. | ||
| - | Een van de beste boeken op het vlak van intellectuele geschiedenis ooit. | + | ==Imagery, style and themes== |
| + | Gargoyles is a dark, broken work, the first of Bernhard's novels to be translated and the first to gain him national recognition. The writing style is haunting and compulsive, the setting is the fairy-tale landscape of rural Austria, especially the area surrounding a remote mountain gorge. Then there is the Hochgobernitz castle, which seems to be taken right out of a [[Nosferatu]] movie. Its owner - old prince Saurau - is the expression of the best (or worst) Bernhardian values: the [[Habsburg]] stand-in who steals the show with a hundred-page monologue about his own descent into madness and his fraught relationship with his own son. | ||
| - | Er is nog geen oorlog, maar de [[cyberwar]] is alvast begonnen. | + | Bernhard shares with [[Franz Kafka|Kafka]] and [[Samuel Beckett|Beckett]] the ability to extract more than utter gloom from his landscape of inconceivable devastation. While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more – the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin to surrealistic dream-worlds; man’s yearning for health, compassion, sanity. |
| - | [[Verstörung]] | + | ==Excerpts== |
| + | *Each patient doctor and son visit suffers from a different nightmarish ailment by which the father means to expose the boy to the ubiquity of sickness, brutality, and death. "It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact," his father cautions him, "that everything is ''fundamentally sick and sad.''" | ||
| + | *[Prince Saurau on his decaying family] "My sisters but also my daughters always try to keep me going by fraudulent means, deceptions major and minor, but especially through one scandalous ruse: their attention. Each basically knows," he said, "that the world will collapse if I am suddenly not here anymore. If I lose interest and have myself laid out in the summer cottage. Plan to have myself laid out in the summer cottage like my father. A dead father," he said, "really instils fear. Often I think for hours on end of nothing but the mailman. The mail has got to come, I think. Mail! Mail! Mail! ''News!''" | ||
| + | *Communication, family, and death are Saurau’s main interests, bound up as they are with the fate of the old ancestral castle. He is the patriarch of a moribund clan whose life and history centre on Hochgobernitz . It, like Saurau and his family, is a pathetic relic of Old Austria. Saurau lives in fear of his expatriate son who will someday return from exile to liquidate the estate of the old prince is dead. But he says towards the end: "I often think that it is my duty to write to my son in London and tell him what is awaiting him here in Hochgobernitz some day, when I am dead: cold. Isolation. Madness. Deadly monologuing." Saurau's chilling (and bitingly self-reflexive) list is the corrupt inheritance that awaits the sons of Austria's grand monarchical tradition. | ||
| - | Maar dan, op wiens lijn staat Heumaker dan. Bij een recensie van het boek van Cliteur ziet hij in hem een potentiele medestander maar kraakt toch het boek ''[[Tegen de decadentie]]'' van Cliteur af. | + | :;Book’s Epigraph |
| + | :''[[Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie]].'' --[[Blaise Pascal|Pascal]], ''Pensée 206'' | ||
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Gargoyles is one of Thomas Bernhard’s earliest novels, which made the author known both nationally and internationally. Originally published in German in 1967, it’s a kaleidoscopic work, considered by critics his most disquieting and nihilistic. The German title, Verstörung, translates as something like Confusion or Disturbance, but the American publisher chose Gargoyles, perhaps in order to render the array of human freaks the novel depicts to its very end. In fact, this is a singular, surreal study of the nature of humanity.
[edit]
Plot summary
One morning a doctor takes his son—an idealistic student of science and rationality—on his daily rounds through the grim mountainous Austrian countryside. They observe the rural grotesques they encounter—from an innkeeper whose wife has been murdered to a crippled musical prodigy kept in a cage—coping with physical misery, madness, and the brutality of the austere landscape. But when they meet the insomniac Prince Saurau in his castle at Hochgobernitz, his solitary, stationary mind takes over the rest of the novel in an uninterrupted obsessive paragraph. It's a hundred-page monologue by an eccentric, paranoid man, a relentlessly flowing cascade of words that is classic Bernhard: the furious logorrhea is a mesmeric rant, completing the stylistic formation of his art of exaggeration, where he uses metaphors of physical and mental illness to explore the decay of his homeland.
[edit]
Imagery, style and themes
Gargoyles is a dark, broken work, the first of Bernhard's novels to be translated and the first to gain him national recognition. The writing style is haunting and compulsive, the setting is the fairy-tale landscape of rural Austria, especially the area surrounding a remote mountain gorge. Then there is the Hochgobernitz castle, which seems to be taken right out of a Nosferatu movie. Its owner - old prince Saurau - is the expression of the best (or worst) Bernhardian values: the Habsburg stand-in who steals the show with a hundred-page monologue about his own descent into madness and his fraught relationship with his own son.
Bernhard shares with Kafka and Beckett the ability to extract more than utter gloom from his landscape of inconceivable devastation. While the external surface of life is unquestionably grim, he somehow suggests more – the mystic element in experience that calls for symbolic interpretation; the inner significance of states that are akin to surrealistic dream-worlds; man’s yearning for health, compassion, sanity.
[edit]
Excerpts
- Each patient doctor and son visit suffers from a different nightmarish ailment by which the father means to expose the boy to the ubiquity of sickness, brutality, and death. "It would be wrong to refuse to face the fact," his father cautions him, "that everything is fundamentally sick and sad."
- [Prince Saurau on his decaying family] "My sisters but also my daughters always try to keep me going by fraudulent means, deceptions major and minor, but especially through one scandalous ruse: their attention. Each basically knows," he said, "that the world will collapse if I am suddenly not here anymore. If I lose interest and have myself laid out in the summer cottage. Plan to have myself laid out in the summer cottage like my father. A dead father," he said, "really instils fear. Often I think for hours on end of nothing but the mailman. The mail has got to come, I think. Mail! Mail! Mail! News!"
- Communication, family, and death are Saurau’s main interests, bound up as they are with the fate of the old ancestral castle. He is the patriarch of a moribund clan whose life and history centre on Hochgobernitz . It, like Saurau and his family, is a pathetic relic of Old Austria. Saurau lives in fear of his expatriate son who will someday return from exile to liquidate the estate of the old prince is dead. But he says towards the end: "I often think that it is my duty to write to my son in London and tell him what is awaiting him here in Hochgobernitz some day, when I am dead: cold. Isolation. Madness. Deadly monologuing." Saurau's chilling (and bitingly self-reflexive) list is the corrupt inheritance that awaits the sons of Austria's grand monarchical tradition.
- Book’s Epigraph
- Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie. --Pascal, Pensée 206
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