Re: The Loser

[Allan MacLeod <allan.macleod@usask.ca>]

DUBBADAD@aol.com wrote:

> I have been reading Thomas Bernhards book "The Loser". I would be interested
> in getting any thoughts and opinions on it if anyone else has read it. I
> realize it is fiction but it seems a bit difficult to follow. I haven't been
> able to quite pinpoint what the author is trying to say with it. Any opinions
> would be appreciated.

The Glenn Gould in The Losers bears little resemblance to the real Glenn Gould.
For one thing, he is American.  I don't know if this mistake is a deliberate
one, or a result of Bernhard's ignorance, or the consequence of a European
tendency to forget that North America includes three states within its
territory.  In any case, Gould is just being used as a foil to bring out the
character of the loser who resents Gould's effortless mastery of the
piano.  In
that sense, it is a book somewhat along the line of Amadeus:  how genius gnaws
away at the vitals of a competent but lesser artist.  As a book about Gould,
forget it.  Bernhard has used a real person's name to create a fictionally
necessary character.As Bernhard puts it, "For there's nothing more
terrible than
to see a person so magnificent that his magnificence destroys us." 
There is an
echo of Rilke's idea here :  "For beauty is nothing/but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure,/and we are so awed becuase it serenely
disdains/ to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying."  (Mitchell translation)

I have tried to note down references to Gould in other people's work.  Edward
Said, the Palestinian/American literary / political critic has much to
say about
him in his book Musical Elaborations.  Said also wrote a memorial
tribute to
Gould in a very early issue (the second or third) of Vanity Fair before its
quality declined.  In the book he writes, "it is the wonderfully intelligent
exercise of his fingers in polyphonic music that separates Gould from every
other pianist....Unlike many performing musicians, he seemed to have not only
ideas and a mind but the ability to apply them to music both as a
performer and
as critic.  His performances, in short, approximated to an argument, and his
discursive arguments are often borne out by his pianistic feats."  That
is to
say, his performances should be listened to in conjunction with a
reading of his
essays and liner notes, many of them collected in Tim Page's book.
Milan Kundera also mentions Gould's performances for students at the Moscow
Conservatory in 1957 in an essay in Testaments Betrayed.  Gould, defying Soviet
cultural policy, played Webern, Schoenberg and Krenek and then argued
that they
represented a continuity in Western music and demonstrated that by
playing some
Bach fugues.
As I wrote in an article on Gould:  "It is probably true to say that no person
today can claim to be fully educated who is not familiar with Gould's
life and
accomplishments, for more and more writters make allusion to Gould to
make some
point or other."
            Allan MacLeod