It’s the platitude of all platitudes. Seeing (with your own two eyes!) is believing. Vision is supposed to be an unimpeachable verifier of truth. What happens when this truism fails? When you grow up in a city bombed with atrocities throughout your life or nurse a psychosis alone in the woods? In Elfreide Jelinek’s Wonderful Wonderful Times, Anna is one of five teenagers obsessed with depravity and violence. She and her twin brother Rainer are poor and always in stark contrast, especially from their perspective, to the desirable, immaculate, rich Sophie. In Thomas Bernhard’s “The Cap,” an unnamed narrator leaves his research in the city to stay in the woods in his newly widowed brother’s house to patiently await insanity. He becomes obsessed
…show more content…
He’s lost his job as a researcher and left the city. There’s no trace left of any possible identity for him, not even a given name. He wants it this way, literally writing “I want to limit myself solely to the twilight in Unterach” (Bernhard 22-3). Twilight is the stage of evening in between daylight and night. Unterach comes from an Austro-Bavarian word meaning “between waters,” which geographically describes the village. This is where Bernhard’s nameless narrator wants to be, in a liminal place where he has no definition. He sends the servants home and closes the shutters, trying to escape anything with meaning to which he could compare himself to. Then one day, he finds a cap on the ground. “A cap with a brim such as the butchers, but also the woodcutters and the farmers of the district have on their heads,” he notes, and there is the first association (Bernhard 35). The cap looks like the cap of these workers. The narrator immediately decides he is not able to wear the cap, although it fits (he checked), because he is not in those professions. His crisis of identity begins to bubble up. “What is the colour of the cap? Is it black? Is it green? Grey?” (Bernhard 35). He doesn’t explain what, but these differences clearly hold meaning for the protagonist. The fact that the cap is discarded, its color, its style: these are all tangible traits with definite meaning, not something suitable for the limbo he is seeking. It is too much to look at this cap, with all its definitions and boundaries, so he runs around the house, trying to find a suitable place. Finally, with no other choice, he chooses to wear the cap indoors, “without having to look at it” (Bernhard 31). The nervous stream of anxiety becomes a nervous stream of excitement. He does not enjoy explicit
He’s lost his job as a researcher and left the city. There’s no trace left of any possible identity for him, not even a given name. He wants it this way, literally writing “I want to limit myself solely to the twilight in Unterach” (Bernhard 22-3). Twilight is the stage of evening in between daylight and night. Unterach comes from an Austro-Bavarian word meaning “between waters,” which geographically describes the village. This is where Bernhard’s nameless narrator wants to be, in a liminal place where he has no definition. He sends the servants home and closes the shutters, trying to escape anything with meaning to which he could compare himself to. Then one day, he finds a cap on the ground. “A cap with a brim such as the butchers, but also the woodcutters and the farmers of the district have on their heads,” he notes, and there is the first association (Bernhard 35). The cap looks like the cap of these workers. The narrator immediately decides he is not able to wear the cap, although it fits (he checked), because he is not in those professions. His crisis of identity begins to bubble up. “What is the colour of the cap? Is it black? Is it green? Grey?” (Bernhard 35). He doesn’t explain what, but these differences clearly hold meaning for the protagonist. The fact that the cap is discarded, its color, its style: these are all tangible traits with definite meaning, not something suitable for the limbo he is seeking. It is too much to look at this cap, with all its definitions and boundaries, so he runs around the house, trying to find a suitable place. Finally, with no other choice, he chooses to wear the cap indoors, “without having to look at it” (Bernhard 31). The nervous stream of anxiety becomes a nervous stream of excitement. He does not enjoy explicit