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

Abstract

Verstörung-often considered a minor work by Bernhard-is a somewhat overlooked example of ecologically oriented fiction in the German language. In this novel, Bernhard examines the implications of a darkly ecological concept of the environment (as this article characterizes it with reference to Timothy Morton), confronting it with epistemological questions and placing it in the context of psychoanalysis and Schopenhauerian metaphysics. The novel anticipates some important aspects of the Anthropocene thesis in its critique of the nature/culture divide, its widening of the concept of agency, its insistence on viewing individual human history in the context of natural history, its problematization of the natural/synthetic distinction and its consistent utilization of geological imagery. Verstörung is suffused with a remarkable, dark, and twisted proto-Anthropocene aesthetics. It is a post-mortem examination of the world after nature, a Gefühls-und Gesteinsgeschichte that carries the reader into the dark heart of the Austrian countryside.