Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard Page A

apply for the position as steward. A kind of mysterious megalomania was clearly expressed by that act on the one hand, since he lacked all the prerequisites for the post, did not have the slightest qualification for it, I said. But I could well imagine what hadprompted him to follow up my advertisement. Irrational, I said,” the prince said. “A person reads a newspaper notice offering a position which this person knows he will never obtain because, as I said, he completely lacks the prerequisites for this position, but the notice haunts him, he can no longer tear himself away from it, he simply can’t escape it, he applies for the post, he knows it is absurd to apply for the post, he recognizes that everything he does in connection with the newspaper notice is absurd, everything, and yet he follows it up. I can well imagine, I said to Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “that a person reads a notice and thinks that this notice has been inserted for no one but himself (certainly!) and that the person is completely captivated by the notice and applies for the opening, no matter how irrational that may be. Since he, Zehetmayer, was fully aware that he had not the slightest prerequisite for the steward’s position I advertised, since he is aware, has always been aware, that he is a schoolteacher and knows nothing about forestry in practice let alone as a science, that he doesn’t understand nature because he believes in the simplicity of nature as a helpless victim of nature, because he is always inside nature, therefore it is nothing but morbidity to apply for the steward’s position. It was, as I said to Zehetmayer,” the prince said, “a piece of trickery, more so of himself than of me, for that I am being tricked when he applies for the advertised position of steward was quite clear.… I did not say,” the prince said, “that everything within which and by which Zehetmayer exists and has always existed up to now is deception, even though that is true, but I did say that a deceptive element has already been his downfall. I imagine the most disastrous family situations in connection with him,” the prince said. “I tell Zehetmayer:I suppose you had an overwrought, abnormal childhood. But the man doesn’t understand me. I think he comes from the Puschach Valley where they speak that awful dialect and doesn’t understand me, and then I realize at once as I speak the sentence ‘I suppose you had …’ and so on,” the prince said, “that the man doesn’t understand me and not only because he comes from the Puschach Valley. I realize that when you’re talking to such a man (and to such
people
, of course!) you have to speak simply, you must not voice anything complex, anything that strains the mind. With such a man as Zehetmayer you must not commit the crime of your own nature, I mean the crime of thrusting him into your own thoughts, into your vast and endless labyrinth of numbers and figures and ciphers, the maze of your own nature. The greatest crimes,” the prince said, “are committed in words by superiors against inferiors, I think, crimes committed in thoughts
and
in words. In his first few sentences vis-à-vis me Zehetmayer began to perceive that his presence in my house [The prince did not say: in my
castle
] is nonsense. Sitting opposite me, with mechanical apathy he keeps moving his immobility the whole while. Whenever he opened his mouth to say something that he after all did not say, didn’t dare to say, I was able to study what was grotesque about him. I studied the grotesqueness of his very presence, not only in connection with him and with him as a human being, but also in connection with me, in connection with everything between him and me, me and him—in connection with everything. He said he had read my notice at breakfast and all at once innumerable images all related to my notice had come to him; images that all had their source in my notice, had been projected from it into his brain. He