Inscribing trauma: about Die Ursache, by Thomas Bernhard

Abstract

This article is an extension of a research project developed during a Postdoctoral Residency in the Graduate Program in Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), focusing on the autobiographical works of Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931–1989). The study examines Origem (Origin), a volume published by Companhia das Letras that compiles five autobiographical narratives written between 1975 and 1982. This article presents some findings from the analysis of the first narrative, Die Ursache (The Cause), written in 1975. The primary objective was to explore how the formation of the autobiographical subject, through specific narrative choices, intertwines with traces of lived experiences shaped by the Austrian socio-historical context, particularly marked by Nazism and the immediate post-war period. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from psychoanalysis and Lacanian materialism, I investigated how Bernhard employs language as a tool to articulate symptoms and anxieties stemming from traumatic experiences that transcend the individual and reflect a collective dimension. The analysis of Die Ursache underscores the persistent imprints of the Nazi state, highlighting the impossibility of social conformity and the enduring presence of trauma, while destabilizing the centrality of the narrative in constructing an ‘ideal ego’—an approach informed by Lacan's notion that the centrality of the ‘I’ is an illusion and Žižek's assertion that the subject is never constructed outside of ideology. This study seeks to engage with the historical and cultural complexities of Bernhard's era without reducing the narrative to psychological categories such as ‘resentment’ or ‘melancholy’, nor viewing the content solely as the expression of a victim. Finally, the article identifies moments where the symptoms reveal the obstacles, impossibility, and persistence of the Real.