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In the three a long time since his dying, Bernhard’s affect over the modern novel has adopted a parabolic trajectory. He has gone from being a writers’ author, a well-kept secret, to a author whose affect is felt, even when not directly, over a broad array of novels which have seen each gross sales and demanding acclaim. Bernhard acolytes embrace Geoff Dyer, Ben Marcus, Ben Lerner, Julie Otsuka, Tim Parks, Emily Hall, Jordan Castro, Mark Haber, László Krasznahorkai, Lucy Ellmann, Mauro Javier Cárdenas, Claudia Piñeiro, Jen Craig, and Adam Ehrlich Sachs—all of whom have spoken about him in interviews and essays, even when to speak about escaping his affect—whereas traces of his type will be noticed additional afield, within the work of Thuận, Roberto Bolaño, Danielle Dutton, Oli Hazzard, Rachel Cusk, and Mathias Énard.
These lists are, after all, not exhaustive. Geoff Dyer described Bernhard’s work because the end result of a “European tradition of the literature of neurasthenia”; it now appears equally apt to put him because the progenitor of a youthful, extra international—if not nonetheless largely US-centric—custom of neurasthenic literature. The key options that mark his type—the obsessive rants; the lengthy, digressive sentences replete with repetitions and contradictions; plots that see their protagonist do little greater than suppose and stroll—are every distinctive sufficient that his affect will be simple to identify. Adam Ehrlich Sachs has said that “you know [Bernhard’s footprint] when you see it.” As he explains, there may be “the daisy-chained dialogue-attribution footprint, the exaggeration-to-the-point-of-madness footprint, the solely-internal-landscape-no-nature footprint, the single-paragraph footprint, the relentless-conceptual-critique-turned-somehow-into-fiction footprint, and so on.”
This affect will be so unmistakable that even W. G. Sebald, hardly an creator considered at present as unoriginal, once admitted:
I used to be all the time, because it have been, tempted to declare overtly from fairly early on my nice debt of gratitude to Thomas Bernhard. But I used to be additionally aware of the truth that one oughtn’t to do this too overtly, as a result of then instantly one will get put in a drawer which says Thomas Bernhard, a follower of Thomas Bernhard, and many others., and these labels by no means go away.
With all of this mentioned, maybe probably the most distinctive characteristic of Bernhard’s type to indicate its affect within the modern novel, and one typically deployed by Sebald himself, is what I’ll name the Extremely Long Paragraph (ELP), about which comparatively little has been mentioned—apart from the truth that his paragraphs are, certainly, notably lengthy. Before studying him for the primary time, mentioned Emily Hall, she considered him as “the guy with no paragraph breaks.” It is probably going the very first thing you’ll discover whenever you decide up one among his books; for a lot of, it offers cause sufficient to depart his e book proper on the shelf. Personally, I’ve had little success in getting anybody to learn his work apart from these whose personal tastes and inclinations had already put him on their radar. Some of his books have just one paragraph, and for people who comprise extra, they’re nonetheless so few that you can simply rely their quantity after rapidly flicking by way of. These paragraphs, as I’ll present in additional element later, have been popping up in all places, significantly prior to now 20 years—and for causes that don’t appear incidental to the occasions we live by way of.
Bernhard’s work stands aside. It is, after all, sensible and influential for causes that go far past the size of his paragraphs. He appears prepared to interrupt each conference, and his narrator’s untrammeled, typically vitriolic ranting is permission-giving for individuals who really feel hemmed in by ever-shifting fashions of what’s correct to say. For my half, Bernhard saved me sane as I accomplished an MFA. Every time the idiosyncrasies in my work have been critiqued within the identify of craft (so-called), I’d, as a matter of formality, learn a couple of pages of Bernhard—any would do—and would suppose how his work may be critiqued, even perhaps condescended to, in a workshop. The lengthy sentences, the absence of plot, the fashion, the propensity to inform (time and again) slightly than present—all stand against the conventions of kind and elegance that mark the MFA-to-industry literary pipeline.
That mentioned, I’m significantly fascinated with discussing Bernhard’s ELPs—in saying extra about them than their size—as a result of the early Twenty first century has been an age of rising distraction. Over the previous 20 years, authors and critics (together with Bernhard followers) have decried the brand new applied sciences—smartphones and social media, most distinguished amongst them—which have, by harming our capability to maintain consideration, put the novel underneath existential risk. With a lot countless distraction, the argument roughly goes, one can now not give novels the form of particular consideration they demand of us. Unlike earlier critics of fast-evolving mass media, who had taken purpose, for instance, at how tv consumption affected children, these critics see Twenty first-century applied sciences as so damaging for cognition that they embrace themselves among the many compromised.
And but Bernhard’s ELP—which does, admittedly, daunt many readers sufficient that they depart his books on the shelf—is proliferating. Is this as a result of they swimsuit a distracted consideration? Or do they, slightly, by way of the calls for they make on readers, present a way for resisting countless distractions? If so, do they not display the resilience of precisely the form of attentive capacities that the brand new applied sciences are allegedly destroying? To reply these questions, I’ll first have a look at the claims being made about expertise and a focus. Then I’ll have a look at how the ELP has come to precise itself throughout a variety of novels within the Twenty first century. Finally, I’ll study what sort of consideration the ELP calls for. I wish to present how the ELP, amongst different issues, has served as a response, of types, to our distracted age—and to spotlight not a lot the inevitable dying of the novel because the novel’s capability to take root in even the harshest terrain and discover a approach, not regardless of however due to this harshness, to flourish.
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In an interview with Reuters in 2010, Philip Roth expressed despair at rising expertise’s impact on studying: “The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people’s reach anymore,” he mentioned. “Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it.”
Will Self, writing in 2014, echoed this sentiment: “If you accept that [within 20 years] the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web,” he writes, “do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth.” For Self, the reply to this query is clearly no: the dying of the novel is sealed.
In 2016, Jonathan Safran Foer added to the chorus, arguing that “[n]ovels demand many things of readers, but the most obvious is attention.” “The more distracted we become, and the more emphasis we place on speed at the expense of depth,” he writes, “the less likely and able we are to care.”
And Tim Parks declared that now “every moment of serious reading has to be fought for, planned for.” He decried the “state of constant distraction we live in and how that affects the very special energies required for tackling a substantial work of fiction.”
The consensus right here is that the novel is underneath risk, primarily as a result of Twenty first-century expertise makes it arduous for us to learn. Ever-present distraction is impacting our capability for “[t]he concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence” (Roth), and the “attention” (Foer) required for “serious reading” (Roth), “serious fiction” (Parks), “deep” studying (Self), or “devot[ing] oneself to the book” (Foer). I can’t say for positive what any of those authors imply by “serious” or “deep” studying. Parks singles out Karl Ove Knausgård to match his work unfavorably to “the serious fiction of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.” The relationship between studying and cognitive capacities has been in each flux and rivalry at the very least for the reason that time of Plato (see Phaedrus), so the thought of a singular, static notion of what counts as “serious” studying is, after all, extremely questionable. Matthew Rubery, in his 2022 e book Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences, does an awesome job of exposing the sheer range of the way of studying (making point out, most memorably, of the savant Kim Peek, who may learn two pages without delay—one with every eye). While I have no idea how my ADHD could be completely different in one other technological age, I’m sure that I’d learn in ways in which may appear unusual to anybody neurotypical. So, one may uncharitably dismiss these authors by the use of the vagueness and obvious subjectivity by which they outline what’s underneath risk. But—giving these authors the good thing about the doubt—we are able to nonetheless say that new applied sciences have an effect on, in a method or one other, such a big portion of the populace that they doubtless do have a widespread impact on how individuals learn, even when this would possibly manifest otherwise for various sorts of readers. What all these authors agree on is that this impact is a nasty one for good studying.
It is value mentioning, as Alice Bennett does in her 2018 e book Contemporary Fictions of Attention: Reading and Distraction within the Twenty-First Century, that these complaints aren’t restricted to well-known authors. The critics Alan Jacobs, David L. Ulin, and Maggie Jackson have all produced in-depth work that, just like the views of Roth, Self, and Foer, “conceives of attention in crisis, with difficulty reading its primary symptom” (as Bennett places it). While these works comprise refined arguments, my goal in citing Roth et al. is to spotlight a common malaise in literary land, a catastrophic sense that our present situations have damaged our brains, placing fiction in its dying throes.
Thomas Bernhard didn’t invent the ELP. Prototypes exist within the final part of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and the start of Samuel Beckett’s Molloy (1951). Both books supply an instance of an unusually lengthy paragraph, however the truth that these books additionally embrace loads of paragraphs of standard dimension—i.e., the truth that their complete variety of paragraphs can’t simply be counted—implies that they don’t fairly rely as examples of the ELP as right here understood. The earliest well-known instance of the ELP is in The Gates of Paradise (1960) by Polish creator Jerzy Andrzejewski, which at 162 pages contains solely two paragraphs (every solely a sentence lengthy), the latter of which is simply 5 phrases. The subsequent is in Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964) by Czech creator Bohumil Hrabal, which at 117 pages contains no chapter or paragraph breaks and consists of just one sentence.
Between these novels and the arrival of Bernhard’s work within the Nineteen Seventies, there are few if every other examples of the ELP, actually not sufficient to quote a pattern. Bernhard, nevertheless, was obsessive about the method. His novels Yes (1978), The Cheap-Eaters (1980), Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982), Concrete (1982), The Loser (1983), Woodcutters (1984), Old Masters: A Comedy (1985), and Extinction (1986) every include just one paragraph; Correction (1975) consists of two; and the memoir Gathering Evidence (1985) consists of solely 5. Among his long-form prose works, then, it is just the early works On the Mountain (composed in 1959, printed in 1989), Frost (1963), Gargoyles (1967), and The Lime Works (1970) that don’t use the method (though the earliest of the 4, On the Mountain, whereas damaged into verse, nonetheless consists of just one sentence).
So, it will be a tall declare to divorce the Twenty first-century novels that use the ELP from Bernhard’s affect. I’ve already quoted what W. G. Sebald, whose masterpiece Austerlitz (2001) consists of just one paragraph, has mentioned about Bernhard’s affect. In an internet interview, Lucy Ellmann, whose Goldsmiths Prize–profitable Ducks, Newburyport (2019) serves as an edge case for the ELP (it consists ostensibly of 1 single-sentence paragraph interrupted by a number of quick interludes), placed Bernhard second in a listing of her high six authors, saying that he “changed the direction of the novel.” Mark Haber, creator of the one-paragraph-long Reinhardt’s Garden (2019), told an interviewer that if a reader compares Haber’s work to Bernhard’s, it’s “the biggest compliment in the world.” Bernhard’s affect on him, he says, “is unmistakable, I wear it proudly.” David Albahari, creator of the one-paragraph-long Leeches (2011) is also explicit about Bernhard’s affect on him, significantly with respect to his use of the ELP: “Thomas Bernhard had a huge influence on me in terms of the form of the novel,” he informed an interviewer at The Arts Fuse. “Almost all my novels are written in one uninterrupted paragraph.” László Krasznahorkai, in the meantime, whose novels have a tendency to make use of only a few paragraphs and whose novella The Last Wolf (launched in English translation in 2016) consists of just one, has admitted that Bernhard’s work “made a very deep impression” on him. Finally, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s single-paragraph novel Revulsion (1997) reveals Bernhard’s affect even in its subtitle: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador.
Other novels that use the method embrace By Night in Chile (2000) by Roberto Bolaño, Zone (2008) by Mathias Énard, SPRAWL (2018) by Danielle Dutton, Dead Souls (2021) by Sam Riviere, Lorem Ipsum (2021) by Oli Hazzard, The Hole by José Revueltas (1969, printed in English translation in 2018), and Chinatown (2005) by Thuận. Each of those novels reveals examples of the ELP. That’s 12 novels up to now, and I haven’t discovered all of them. In the Nineteen Eighties, Bernhard was accountable for just about each novel that makes use of the ELP. For the last decade after Bernhard’s dying in 1989, I solely know of the ELP’s look within the works of W. G. Sebald, whose most dramatic use, in Austerlitz, arrived in 2001. The ELP, then, seems to be taking off within the Twenty first century.
I wish to level out, nevertheless, that, whereas they share the ELP, these authors are all doing their very own factor. Their nationalities vary throughout the United States, Serbia, Hungary, El Salvador, Chile, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, and France. Their books’ topic issues vary from historic fiction (Reinhardt’s Garden) to political satire (By Night in Chile) to a sendup of the UK poetry scene (Dead Souls) to a narrative a couple of lady making pies whereas despairing over the way forward for the United States (Ducks, Newburyport). While diehard followers of Bernhardian writing absolutely observe lots of them, these authors don’t in any other case share a unitary viewers: Bolaño and Ellman have written bestsellers and gained main prizes, whereas Riviere and Hazzard are publishing with smaller presses and reaching comparatively area of interest audiences.
So what, precisely, other than intimidating the poor reader who casually picks up one among these books in a retailer, is the ELP doing? And what do lengthy paragraphs must do with expertise and a focus?
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The Cambridge English Dictionary defines a paragraph as “a short part of a text, consisting of at least one sentence and beginning on a new line. It usually deals with a single event, description, idea, etc.”
To simplify and reduce repetition, I’ll use the phrase concept to incorporate occasions, descriptions, and no matter else a paragraph would possibly current as a unified entire. I may even assume that, whereas a number of paragraphs might comprise a number of concepts, these concepts can themselves kind a unity, a single concept fabricated from smaller concepts. The ELP as utilized by Bernhard and his followers is uncommon for extra than simply its size. Bernhard’s texts typically span a wide selection of occasions throughout two or extra narrative timelines, and whereas he might repeat and undermine the identical concept inside a person sentence, his books are filled with a mess of concepts. This is true of all books that deploy the ELP: it’s merely not potential (I believe that is apparent) to put in writing one thing of a novel’s size that doesn’t comprise multitudes.
Paragraphs help readers. Paragraphs assist readers navigate texts. A typical skim-reading methodology entails studying simply the primary and final sentence of every paragraph; from this alone, the reader can contact upon many of the textual content’s core concepts and purchase a common understanding of its content material.
Paragraphs additionally supply readers locations to begin, pause, and cease. A paragraph break alerts to the reader that there’ll doubtless be a shift in concept between one paragraph and the following, even when the paragraphs mixed do, collectively, current a bigger concept. If a reader breaks off studying in the midst of a paragraph, earlier than its concept has been totally expressed, it’s extra doubtless that they must begin at the start of the paragraph upon returning to the textual content—not on the precise level at which they final left off. It is less complicated to begin at the start of a discrete part than to select one thing up halfway. Someone may level out right here that the identical may very well be mentioned about stopping wherever on a web page or in a chapter, which themselves might include a single (bigger) concept. The distinction is that one can return halfway by way of one thing whether it is already damaged into smaller discrete components.
Once the reader reaches the top of a paragraph, it’s likewise a handy place to pause and take into account the paragraph as an entire or to take a break. It is sensible for a reader to make use of the signposts that an creator gives them. Thus, the reader could have an incentive to learn the top of no matter paragraph they’re studying earlier than ending a studying session. The flip facet of that is that the reader has out there to them many appropriate locations to cease, ought to they want to focus their consideration elsewhere (and it’s simple to see how this will make sustained studying tough in a context of fixed distraction).
This might all appear a bit apparent, however it could possibly assist us perceive what occurs when an creator makes use of the ELP.
Firstly, a reader will doubtless discover the textual content tougher to learn: not solely does it exclude a conference designed to make it simpler to navigate however the reader should additionally regulate to a fashion of studying they’re unaccustomed to. Despite the proliferation of novels that use the ELP, there are nonetheless comparatively few, so the demand to adapt to a unique type of writing will largely apply even to readers who take pleasure in studying work that makes use of the method.
Secondly, a reader now not has entry to any options from the creator as to the place breaks might exist between concepts. They will thus must discern these breaks for themselves. But how? How will they know if the creator desires to sign the top of 1 factor and the start of one other? The reply is—until the creator makes an specific assertion to sign a break, which isn’t one thing I’ve seen a lot within the books underneath dialogue—that they gained’t. A reader can’t know if the following sentence will convey one thing to completion till they learn the following sentence. “[I]n order to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to think both sides of this limit,” Ludwig Wittgenstein writes within the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). A paragraph break, which permits us to look past it with out having to learn past it, serves as a software for seeing the opposite facet of a restrict. With no paragraph breaks, there isn’t a technique to see the opposite facet of the restrict till one reaches the clean area that marks the e book’s finish.
The creator has subsequently robbed the reader of a way of deciding upon appropriate moments within the textual content to take a break. If an concept is incomplete, a reader who stops studying might have to return to an earlier a part of the textual content to select it up once more. But selecting an appropriate place to begin, on this context, will likely be simply as tough as selecting an appropriate place to cease. The clearest resolution, then, is for a reader to learn in chunks giant sufficient that they really feel assured they’ll, when selecting the e book up once more, be capable to stick with it with relative ease. The smaller the part the reader reads, the extra doubtless it’s that they are going to depart mid-idea and must discover the thought’s starting once more once they return.
If a reader, subsequently, desires to succeed—and hopefully take pleasure in—a e book that has no or only a few paragraph breaks, they’re incentivized to learn it in sizable chunks. Regular breaks current an impediment to studying, since they may entice a reader in a cycle of backtracking and rereading so as to stand up to hurry. Moreover, if the reader desires to interact with full concepts, they’ve a powerful incentive to maintain on studying, since it’s arduous to make certain—until the creator, once more, makes it specific within the content material—when an concept, occasion, or description is full. I gained’t go as far as to say that that is the one technique to learn the ELP; for some readers, it might be needed to search out different methods. Still, the belief that this methodology represents a standard method to studying the ELP is much stronger than the belief that the modes of consideration required for this method are, owing to expertise, now not potential. The ELP, at a minimal, calls for that we put expertise apart, at the very least sufficient to keep away from getting misplaced. At finest, it gives a possibility for a reader to do precisely what the critics of Twenty first-century studying capacities say we are able to now not do: depart distractions apart and decide to the textual content. This is one—though actually not all—of the explanations I hold coming again to the textual content: first, as a result of I do know I’ve to show my units off if I’m to have any hope of enjoyment, and second, as a result of the character of the paragraph, by way of the mechanisms described above, locks me in.
In his New York Review essay, Tim Parks argues that one of the insidious results of Twenty first-century expertise on consideration “is not simply that one is interrupted; it is that one is actually inclined to interruption.” Perhaps this expertise does on the whole have an effect on individuals’s inclination in direction of interruption—and to learn with such an inclination, I have to add, just isn’t, in my view, a much less legitimate or “serious” type of studying. The ELP, nevertheless, as proven above, asks the reader to droop this inclination. Since the ELP permits no specific division between concepts on the web page, it asks that the reader take an energetic function in making their very own selections about the place one concept ends and one other begins. It permits, and this may be seen when simply studying a couple of pages of Bernhard, concepts to blur into each other. Excluding paragraph breaks may even give an creator distinctive methods of blurring audio system into each other.
So the place does this depart claims that new applied sciences will convey in regards to the finish of the novel? Are Roth, Self, Parks, and the remaining merely throwing a collective millenarian match? Not fairly. I believe they’re proper to level at a number of the challenges these applied sciences pose to deeply attentive studying. With a lot media competing for our consideration, additionally it is truthful to say that the general period of time an individual would possibly commit to studying novels is underneath risk. What these arguments overshadow, nevertheless, is the novel’s versatility, its capability to bend in kind and adapt to the actual issues of its day. Recent proliferation of the ELP reveals the novel responding to its threats by providing, inside itself, a software by way of which readers can resist the habits that fashionable applied sciences in any other case pressure upon them.
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Featured picture: Morton Livingston Schamberg. Painting (formerly Machine), 1916. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Collection Société Anonyme. Photo: Yale University Art Gallery. artgallery.yale.edu, CC0. Accessed February 13, 2023.
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