Gargoyles

by Thomas Bernhard

  “When we talked about the play,” my father said, “you, Prince, kept exclaiming What expense! or Enormous expense! while I, whenever we talked about the flood, was constantly using such words as stage machinery, pantomime, dramatic climax, puppetry.”

  “But basically,” the prince said, “no matter what we talked about on that day, we were really talking about nothing but the flood.”

  “Immediately after the play,” the prince said, “I left the pavilion and walked on the inner walls, because despite the play my mind had not been rid of the noises. And I had been hoping particularly that the play would distract me from my noises. But in fact I could not find distraction from the noises on the inner walls either, and I went to the outer walls. For a short time on the outer walls it was possible for me to shake off the noises, and I looked down from the outer wall at the people who had come to the play and were now riding home. Some went down into the gorge,” the prince said. “I can’t imagine what for. To this day I don’t know why some went down into the gorge. Standing behind a large hemlock, I watched the people bidding good-by to my sisters and my daughters. This play,” the prince said to me, “is arranged by the women, of course. I really have nothing to do with the whole business, but the women put on such a play every year. They invite hundreds of people, people wholly uninteresting to me, and the majority of them repulsive. For the women the play, of course, is always a pretext to invite hundreds of people, who actually come, but then again the play is the least of the reasons for their coming,” the prince said. “The women merely use it to bring the people to the castle, and the people who come up to the castle for the play do not come on account of the play, but out of sheer curiosity. If it were up to me,” the prince said, “not a soul would come up here any more, not a soul, not a single person. I grant you,” he said, “such solitariness is a morbid state, of course. But society, and I mean the whole of society, but in particular the social class that comes to the play, consists of a despicable rabble. But I let the women have their pleasure, and they can invite whomever they like. Since I don’t want to see anyone at Hochgobernitz, the play is a horror to me. Actually,” the prince said, “I stood behind the big hemlock for a few minutes without hearing any noises at all. But in order to warm up, for I had the feeling I was freezing, I walked partway across the courtyard, finally ran a short way, and then, walking slowly, I repeated inaudibly several sentences from the play. My memory has not yet been destroyed, I thought, no, my memory is still intact, since I am able to recite whole sentences from the play, and what is more the most complicated ones. As I walked across the yard, declaiming sentences from the play, I thought that the women and also the young Pole, a relative of ours, had already gone to bed. I actually took pleasure in declaiming whole parts of the play, the longest roles, without a single mistake. Whole sections,” the prince said, “refreshing myself in the rhythm of the sentences. For over an hour I walked back and forth in the courtyard, once on the inner walls, once on the outer walls, without noticing where I was while I walked, and recalled to memory as much as possible of the text of the play. It actually is a good play, it seems to me,” the prince said, “written by one of my cousins, solely for this one performance. I tested my memory in the most ruthless way,” the prince said. “I did not spare myself, and I discovered that my memory is intact. Actually, Doctor, my memory was intact that evening. Suddenly it was absolutely intact. I reconstructed the play,” the prince said. “I was particularly interested in its innermost construction. The theatrical aspects. Suddenly,” the prince said, “I had the feeling that I could go to sleep, that feeling which has become utterly foreign to me, and I descended from the inner wall where I happened to be and went into the yard and started for my room. At first I did not intend to pass through the library, but then I went through the library anyhow; there was a book that interested me, and I wanted to start on it,” the prince said. “And as I entered the library,” he said, “I found the women. I was astonished that they were still up. The Polish cousin was there too. The whole company was sitting on the floor. It was four o’clock in the morning, I saw. The whole company was oddly motionless, sitting on cushions on the floor. There they sat, dead tired on their cushions, in a kind of sleepless tension, with their whisky. Suddenly,” the prince said, “I had the greatest desire to start a discussion with these people. ‘Isn’t it cold here?’ I said to them. ‘Isn’t it much too cold here?’ And I started at once talking about the antibody in nature. The subject sprang to my mind at once. I was able to develop my thoughts in the early morning chill very well and very rapidly,” the prince said. “I had good listeners; suddenly I felt: You haven’t had such good listeners in a long time, you’ve waited for years for such good listeners. To think that these people can listen so well! And also discuss! I thought. The young Pole discussed splendidly, splendidly,” the prince said. “But all at once, and now notice this, Doctor,” the prince said, “the noises came back. So all this while I have been able to suppress them only once, I thought, suppress them by means of the play. Yes, the play! The noises instantly destroyed my thoughts, changed everything inside my head into a chaos. Deafening. Naturally my listeners knew nothing about that. Naturally not,” the prince said. “They couldn’t look inside my brain, of course. But my listeners certainly felt that a wonderful orderliness inside my brain had suddenly become a frightful chaos, a frightful, deafening chaos. The pain at that moment,” the prince said, “when the noises started again and shattered everything inside my brain, was so frightful that I thought I would have to stop my lecture and therefore put an end to the whole discussion. But because, as I’ve said, I had not had such attentive listeners for years, such honest, exacting, and, so it seemed to me, such highly charged listeners, so splendidly equipped for discussion—because of this I would not give in and succeeded in restoring order in my brain. It was half past four in the morning and I spoke partly, because that was requisite, in Polish; above all I had to keep my attention fixed on the Pole. I spoke about the antibody in nature, I spoke on nature and on the antibody in nature, on nature and on the antibody and on the antibody that emerges from nature. While working out these ideas I probed the degrees of difficulty in my thinking contrasted with the degrees of difficulty in the thinking of my listeners. Probably because of the play,” the prince said, “this intellectual tension among us, which I had thought no longer possible, had suddenly become possible again. It was like a scientific conference. There developed an intellectual community that was the most concentrated thing imaginable, partly because of the Pole’s presence. At the climax of the discussion I told my listeners what a discussion is, told them that a discussion is something entirely different from what people nowadays think a discussion is. I had the impression that the people assembled in the library were completely transformed, that they were not horrible relatives, but receptive people, capable of thought, capable of trains of thought, capable of developing trains of thought, able to engage in discussion. I found them fundamentally changed characters,” the prince said. “They were all suddenly different! I had the impression that I was speaking to scientific minds. Pacing back and forth, I spoke to scientists! And all at once I myself no longer had a chaotic mind capable of registering nothing but pain, but a clear, scientific brain. Because my thinking was absolutely clear, when I gave examples of it, commented on it, it was steadily incorporated into my listeners, something I no longer thought possible. That morning,” Prince Saurau said, “we enjoyed exercising our minds, even as we enjoyed the dissolving night around us, the daylight coming from the east, the tremendous mechanism of frogs and crickets retreating into the gorge and the valleys. While dawn broke, we abruptly no longer felt ourselves destroyers of one another’s nerves. We had reformed. In all our faces I observed the tranquility of our feelings and mental states, for all that it contained elements of sexual awakening. That morning I realized that we are not yet entirely shattered. My son’s sisters,” the prince said, “fitted in just as well as my o
wn sisters, subordinated themselves to my thought, which had seemed to all of them, in tranquility, a bearable and not an unbearable fantasy, because of the play. Thanks to the sudden clarity of our brains we were all suddenly moved by nature,” the prince said. “How rarely we are capable of tranquility. Suddenly we were all together capable of absorbing the tranquility that always prevails here in Hochgobernitz, and we all felt not the slightest antipathies or weakness. Without any one of them feeling the slightest faltering in their intellectual capacities, they all followed the explanation (as I also was able to observe with growing astonishment) of a monstrosity within the universal physical and chemical machine, a monstrosity that was steadily taking possession of all of us. But all the while,” the prince said, “there were those agonizing noises in my brain. While I led us with the greatest sureness through our thinking as through our own darkness, because I know it, I was constantly being distracted from life by the frightful noises in my brain. Among my own people I felt that I had long ago become invisible to all of them, and I felt so more and more. Suddenly I no longer existed for them at all, was no longer there. I tried to conjure up a mirror image of myself, which cost me the greatest effort, and I made them all look into this mirror image. I imagined,” Prince Saurau said, “that by remaining out on the ramparts and in the yard (after the play) I would once again be able to make a thrust into life there in the library; I seized the opportunity, but in reality I did not succeed. The noises in my head thwart me completely. For a long time I have heard them redoubling every day,” the prince said. “But my torment is a torment beyond your grasp,” he said to my father.

  My father goes to see the prince only to treat him for his insomnia, I thought, without doing anything about his real illness, without, as became more and more evident to me while we walked back and forth along the outer wall of the castle, doing anything about his madness. For suddenly I saw quite clearly that the prince is mad, which had not been evident to me while he was talking about his interviews in the morning. It had seemed then that the prince was not mad, and when he spoke about the applicants for the post of steward I had thought that the prince was anything but mad, contrary to my father’s remarks, for my father in the past had always called the prince mad. But now, as we walked faster and faster on the outer walls of the castle, I saw that the prince is actually mad.

  The prince said: “The difficulty that morning, Doctor, the morning after the play, was for me this: From the moment I entered the library, saw my relatives sitting on the floor, and became aware that I must lead the discussion, must deliver a lecture, I knew that now I could no longer turn back. Now I can no longer return to my thinking, isolated as it is in my thousands of principles. I cannot simply return to my own brain. I must think aloud, must publicly establish clarity about so completely linear a matter as the problem of the antibody in nature. For it is linear, even though it is highly complicated and possibly insoluble. But along with this, Doctor, I must, as an artificial human sacrifice, balance upon a rope stretched across the entire world of the mind, across all sciences and arts, causes and effects, must pass through past and future millennia, through all the innumerable concepts of nature, with my brain presumably already far out in the universal atmosphere, and must move, balancing on my rope, toward a goal lying in uttermost darkness, a goal from which an icy chill already wafted toward me.”

  We stood still.

  “Such a night as the night after the play, the play was good, Doctor, it was a very good play,” the prince said, “such a tranquil night, this calm before the flood, Doctor (because of the play), one of those quiet nights which have become very rare in Hochgobernitz—you can imagine how rare these quiet nights have become in Hochgobernitz since my son has been gone—because the quiet is perfect in Hochgobernitz, because it is really all there is, there is not quiet any more.… There simply is no more quiet, no peace, no tranquility in Hochgobernitz. That night and that cold morning among us and among the books, in this icy cold daybreak atmosphere in which feelings freely are transmuted into thoughts and thoughts freely transmuted into feelings, and that is the ideal magic suddenly to be together and find one another bearable—that night, in which the self-destructive and self-disintegrating elements of the family were so cleverly muted, whether from weariness after the play or from madness before the dawn, or from madness and weariness after the play and before the dawn, so that suddenly in truth everything was able to exist and everything was justified in existing—imagine, suddenly everybody in the house felt the prevailing quiet in the house merely as a quiet prevailing in the house; the dreadfulness of it, the uncanniness of it, had suddenly been taken away. A suddenly uninstrumental society constituted directly for evil, quite in the nature of this house, a society in which a day shaken by the play was transformed from philosophical and unbearable to nonphilosophical and bearable (perhaps a brilliant compound!). On this morning in which the autumn for the first time became palpable in me, in me and, differently, in the others—we suddenly were able to look within ourselves into this year’s autumn (each of us into his own autumn), look in because of our excitement before the play and during the play, look into the tranquility of the autumn after the play, by means of our inner geometry look into the perishing of outer nature.”

  On the morning after the play, with all of them assembled in the library—“except for my son nearly all the members of the family were assembled there,” the prince said, “all of them,” he repeated, and added that for many years he had not observed all of them assembled in Hochgobernitz—on that morning after the play he had delivered a “dissecting lecture,” he said. “They all sit there and listen to what I have to say about nature, and hear about the concept of nature and the concept of the antibody in nature, about the antibody nature concept, and I suddenly find myself looking into my family, into a monstrously large, monstrously outmoded Hochgobernitz, into a horrifying history growing increasingly sinister as it recedes back toward its origins, into a ghastly stench of generations, into a more and more stinking art of generations, artificiality of generations, into a labyrinth of dead horror stories under the Saurau name, from which from time to time I actually keep hearing cries of horror, Doctor, I actually hear cries of horror coming up out of the labyrinth of my family, the belated cries of horror of those who died before me.… Yes,” the prince said, “my son doesn’t write to me, my son is silent, my son studies silently in England, my silently studying son in England. He writes no letters of truth.”

  And a few steps farther on the prince said: “The flood is costing me one and a half millions. A flood in the millions. But,” he said, reverting to the morning after the play, “as I stood there among my people, among those who had remained with me in Hochgobernitz, and as I explained everything to them, but chiefly to this Pole with the highly intelligent face, explained nature, and explained the nature of explanation, for all explanation must be explained,” the prince said, “that’s an ancient, necessary process, well then, as I was attempting to explain and throw light on the concept of nature, the twilight of dawn helps me enormously, the sharpness of the air—as I was talking I look into the faces of my sisters and my daughters—in this autumnal cold one suddenly sees very acutely, Doctor—and I see them all together, I also see my son, my absent son, Doctor, see them all together through myself, and a monstrous constellation dawns on me, possibly the one concept that is sheer horror in itself: I am the father!”

  The prince said: “I see all of them as an incredibly differentiated proto-reality, this proto-reality which comes from me and from which I come—and in my brain there is the din of the noises.”

  Far off, down in the valley, as if in a marionette theater worked from below, we saw laborers on a wooden bridge obeying an invisible foreman, and in the sudden chill in the air we heard a rapidly accelerating din of noises rising up through the woods.

  The prince said: “I have the impression that it would be natural for the world to fly apart at any moment. Or is it that nature
must destroy herself?” he said. “This process is always one that proceeds from within and completes itself outwardly. When I come to, am forced to, this observation, this view, because I apparently have an organism geared only for this observation, this view—when I come to it, I have the feeling that the time has arrived—at first it is only a crumbling, cracks, tears, a rending and crumbling!… This time can go on for centuries, of course, centuries behind me, centuries before me. Millennia. But what astounds me,” the prince said, “is not the fact that these noises have been in my brain, that these noises are always there, have always been, always will be, but the horrible fact that no human being with whom I have ever come in contact—and, my dear Doctor, I have come in contact with so many people, with so many characters that if you saw them all in a heap in front of you your whole world would instantly collapse, for I’ve had so tremendously large a selection of humanity at my disposal and at certain times have associated every day with all possible characters and mentalities—but what astounds me, I say, is that no person, not a single brain, has ever taken notice of these noises or ever will. The fact that this is so is not so shocking, only that I alone am the one person, that my brain alone is the one brain, which is forced to note the frightfulness, the deadliness! Everyone around me—and it is always from myself, from my brain as a kind of thinking Hochgobernitz, so to speak, from my immediate surroundings, that I draw conclusions about the whole, about the whole world in which at any rate the whole of humanity has room—everyone around me has a numbing incapacity for perception, incapacity for observation, incapacity for receptivity.… To me this fact is deadly, it is a deadly fact to me that I am alone in this fact, that I am alone in this fact. This enormous landslide!” the prince cried out, and repeated several times: “This enormous landslide!”