Thomas Bernhard is a kind of figurehead for many authors, I think. (…)

Bernhard’s reclusiveness from the literary scene, his intransigence, the barbed acceptance speeches he gave for literary prizes, make him an exemplar. He just doesn’t care what the literary world thinks. At the same time, he writes and writes, one masterpiece following on the heels of another.

I think Bernhard has become too familiar as the turncoat of Austria, as the scourge of fascism and Catholicism, as the enemy of the middle class, and so on. He’s become a little too easy to accommodate as a pricker of pomposity and an exposer of hypocrisy. Bernhard is more than a satirist. Satire relies on certainties and norms, on the sureness of values, for its effect. So thinking of Bernhard merely as a satirist allows us to contain his work, to make sense of his wildness. It allows us to suppose that he is one of us, on our side …

There is something ​devilish in Bernhard. ›I will not serve‹: that’s what his novels say. This, for me, is what is marked about his comedy. (…) It goes too far. It is indiscriminate. One minute we might nod our heads at its targets, the next minute we might find ourselves the butt of the joke. Above all, black comedy permits no ​comic catharsis – no return to what is good and valuable about the world ...

Did Bernhard influence me? Roger Blin: »I know Antonin Artaud only through his trajectory in me which is endless.« I would say the same of Bernhard …

Lars Iyer: »›The conscience of the world‹: Lars Iyer on Wittgenstein Jr«, Interview mit David Lea, in: London Review Bookshop, 13. August 2014.