Old Masters: A Comedy (3)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Old Masters: A Comedy by Thomas Bernhard.
Upon completing Old Masters I messaged the Viennese friend who gifted me my copy to let her know. “Would it fair to say that this represents the dark underbelly of the Austrian soul?” I asked.
“You could say so,” she replied. “Did you like it?”
“I’m not sure. I alternated between enjoying it and wondering why it was happening.”
“Why the enjoyment was happening?”
“Why the novel was happening, but sometimes the enjoyment too.”
How much you take pleasure in this book as a literary experience might depend on how much you enjoy complaining. I’m a professional critic and enjoy complaining more than is typical or maybe even healthy, although I attempt always to do so in a highbrow manner and under carefully constrained circumstances. Letting the critical impulse bleed out into the rest of life is degrading to the soul, and this is what has happened to Reger. The tragedy is that the core of each of Reger’s complaints seems legitimate or at least plausible. His wife died, we learn, from slipping on the icy steps of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. The museum neglected to sand them. The 87-year-old woman broke her femur. She died during the ensuing surgery at a Catholic hospital. For this, he loathes the museum, the hospital, and the state itself. He utters Catholic as if it were a base insult. Page 197-8:
The city of Vienna fails to grit the approach to the Kunsthistorisches Museum on a day when it is icy and the Kunsthistorisches Museum notifies the ambulance service only after repeated requests and finally the surgeons at the Merciful Brethren Hospital bungle the operation and in the end my wife is dead, Reger said at the Ambassador. We lose the person we have loved most devotedly of all people solely through the negligence of the city of Vienna and through the negligence of the Austrian state and through the negligence of the Catholic Church, Reger said at the Ambassador then.
He is still ranting about it on page 200: “A crime has been committed against me, a municipal-governmental-Catholic-ecclesiastical atrocity that I can do nothing about.” No doubt a misfortune has befallen him, but is this the right way to think about it?
The novel is an extended meditation on imperfection, in art and life. It suggests that except for a few interruptions of civilization, pleasure, and high achievement, the general run of things consists of compromise and disaster. Reger is correct in his way that if you look at anything too closely it becomes unimpressive and even distasteful. One is reminded of numerous passages of the Dhammapada, in which contemplation of any phenomenon reveals it to be unsatisfactory and empty of selfhood. But for Reger, and maybe a particular kind of Western person more generally, this realization is not liberating. Instead it mires one in ever deeper pits of disgust. “Anything we study thoroughly ultimately disappoints us,” he says (p. 179). Consequently, “By now it has become absolutely impossible for me to read Goethe, Reger said, to listen to Mozart, to look at Leonardo or Giotto, I no longer have any prerequisites for that.”
Reger strains credulity. But so does Greg Allen, who, in an essay previously discussed, found himself so appalled by current events that he lost his taste for Vermeer and Rothko and Newman and Janet Cardiff and Jacob Lawrence. Reger, at least, is fictional. Reger complains that the Kunsthistorisches is not a first-rate institution because it contains no Goyas. It has nearly every Jan Brueghel the Elder that you can think of, but Brueghel’s name doesn’t come up once in the novel. The Buddhist problem of existence is that you have entered the cake shop, and ordered one slice of cake after another until the very idea of cake is revolting. The existential problem of Old Masters is that you have entered the cake shop and ordered steak. You think this is reasonable because the two words rhyme.
Contrast this attitude with that of J.F. Martel in his Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, also previously discussed in three parts. For Martel, imperfections in art distinguish classics from masterworks, which are made supremely well, but are merely made supremely well. Classics instead “use the aesthetic as a springboard to something else” (p. 82). That something else is a reality beyond language, what Martel terms the capital-R Real. Reger is missing the possibility that the imperfections may be more than spoilage. At least they may be opportunities for sympathy and humility. Contemplated further, they may be perceivable as another order of perfection. There is nothing but Him, says Deuteronomy 4:35, perhaps. Their expression may matter more than their correctness. As Robert Kulicke once said about Albert York, “What Al doesn’t understand is that in art you never hit what you’re aiming at, but the difference may not be downward.”
Reger’s myriad complaints finally boil down to one, on pages 227-8:
I have always thought that it was music that meant everything to me, and at times that it was philosophy, or great or greatest or the very greatest writing, 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. The things we inflict on that one beloved person, Reger said, the thousands and hundreds of thousands of pains we inflicted on this one person whom we loved more than anyone else, the torments we inflicted on that person and yet we loved them more than anyone else, Reger said. When that person whom we loved more than anyone else is dead they leave us with a terribly guilty conscience with which we have to live after that person’s death and which will choke us one day, Reger said. None of those books or writings which I had collected in the course of my life and which I had brought to the Singerstrasse flat to cram full all these shelves were ultimately any use, I had been left alone by my wife and all those books and writings were ridiculous.
It’s a stern warning to us who dedicated ourselves so completely to the arts. Art doesn’t solve anything, it’s here to exist. Whether the same is true of us is an open question.
The next Asynchronous Studio Book Club title is In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi, which we will read over the next three weeks. Grassi, who trained as a conservator at the Uffizzi, is one of the giants at The New Criterion.
J.F. Martel of the aforementioned Reclaiming book has kindly agreed to be the inaugural guest of the Dissident Muse Journal podcast. I have a lot to learn about Substack podcast functionality, but pencil in Monday, July 22, at 1pm EST. If there’s some live content to offer, it will be scheduled for then.
Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.
Our next title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.
Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.
Art is more of a rescue than a solution.