On The Mountain
| Author | Thomas Bernhard |
|---|---|
| Original title | In der Höhe |
| Translator | Russell Stockman, with Afterword by Sophie Wilkins |
| Country | Austria |
| Language | German |
| Series | Quartet Encounters |
| Genre | biography, monologue |
| Publisher | Quartet Books (Namara Group) |
|
Publication date
|
1991 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 116 pp (143 pp with Afterword) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 29791619 |
| Preceded by | The Loser (Der Untergeher) |
| Followed by | Yes (Ja) |
On the Mountain is Thomas Bernhard’s first prose work, which he completed in 1959, yet the last of his works to be published, in 1989, the year of his death.
Based on autobiographical elements which constitute a kind of encyclopaedic view of Bernhard's world, this book gives a rare insight into the birth of a remarkable literary oeuvre paralleling that of Kafka and of Beckett. In fact, Sophie Wilkins, in her Afterword, compares it to Kafka's short story "Description of a Struggle".
Written as one sentence, it is a monologue delivered by a court reporter who meets a variety of characters, among whom are a secondary school teacher - the only intellectual - an innkeeper, and various ladies who afford him favours or bully and humiliate him. His only true attachment is to his filthy dog. The dog is a dirty, smelly body detested by the housekeeper who wants him and his owner out, but it's precisely this indubitable physical reality of him that makes him indispensable; without it, there's no real life in his life, and therewith no ideas, no literature that means anything.
On the Mountain is a special kind of prose: relieved of its function as a carrier of common information,it presents itself as some such medium as poetry, music, painting, sculpture. The seemingly random notes of this book, its disjunct, diffuse mutterings are the vehicle for a dramatic conflict between an embattled life force intent upon self-creation, self-definition, saying "All this is only a preparation for becoming me," and its equally determined opposition, threatening to make nonsense of all that. A real sickness-unto-death is made into a fulcrum for survival in an arena which is the human condition understood as a condition of immitigable deadlock.
On its publication soon after Bernhard's death, On the Mountain was hailed as a "self-portrait of the artist as a young man" cast in the Schopenhauerian vein, and its high misanthropic tone and desolate humour do indeed anticipate all his subsequent work. Reviews described it as a "mighty prose poem," a masterly "debut and valedictory in one," an "early testament," full of pessimism and comical bleakness—Bernhard's case against intellectualised irrelevance, gripping and humane, where the nihilism of the 20th century found its most uncompromising expression.
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