Frost

Autopsies on the body of nature: Dark ecology in Thomas Bernhard'sVerstörung

“…In Thomas Bernhard's first novel, Frost (1963), the countryside (i.e., nature as understood in opposition to urban space) no longer figures as the kind of sanctuary that has been its predominant image since the Romantic period. It is no longer seen as a protective shell around the individual nor—in the modern capitalist version of this ideal—as a site of leisurely recuperation and “experiential consumption.” If anything, Bernhard asserts, nature is “where darkness pulls the rope tight” (Bernhard, 2008, 71). This reconfiguration of the relationship between city and countryside, urban and rural existence is at the crux of Bernhard's oeuvre 1 .…”

“…Instead, Bernhard's works tend to draw the un pleasantness of the natural world forth, focusing on disorder, decay, natural disasters, and the negative psychological aspects of knowing oneself “phenomenologically glued to Earth,” as Timothy Morton phrases it in the context of his “dark ecology” (Morton, 2017, 163). In the almost Gnostic perspective of Bernhard's textual universe, the world as a whole is defined as “a progressive dimming of light” (Bernhard, 2008, 330). His readers are confronted with the suffocating consequences of a metaphysical “darkening” that applies to the universe at large, although in Bernhard's typical comical exaggeration nature proves even more ominous than culture.…”