As the narrator of The Cheap-eaters says:
Life or existence was nothing other than the unceasing and actually uninterrupted and hopeless attempt to extricate oneself from everything in every possible department and drag oneself into the future, a future that time and again had nothing to offer but the renewal of this selfsame lethal process.
This is why all of Bernhard’s internal wrangling with form, with displacement, with beginning, is so important for the works as literature. The Cheap-Eaters demonstrates that the process by which the novel is written, however futile, is not simply a stylistic feature but co-determinate and co-determining with the activity of life.
Rather than enabling us to forget the debility of language and allowing us to revel in its constructions, Bernhard’s self-questioning in The Cheap-eaters shows us that it is paradoxically by resisting literature’s act of creation that one remains closest to life. The reason for doing so is not merely to demonstrate the incapacity of literature, to reveal the wizard behind the curtain for its own sake. Rather, it is that making literature in this way reveals something fundamental about what it is to be human, about our human condition. In order for the world to mean something, we have to reach reduce it, whilst attempting to reach across, to make our reduction always more than what it is. To speak, to name, to narrate, to write: the ways we interpret and understand the world, all do violence against its richness and potentiality. Bernhard is a writer who reveals this in his self-appointed role as a story-destroyer not because he simply removes a traditional plot structure from his work, but because he attacks the conditions of possibility for that structure in the first place. He goes against the story that literature tells itself. Writing in and through such a catastrophe, what is there left to say? Well, for Bernhard at least:
There’s the non-existent conversation with the past, which itself no longer exists, which will never exist again. There’s the conversation with long, non-existent sentences. There’s the dialogue with non-existent nature, intercourse with concepts that are non-concepts, that never could be concepts. Intercourse with conceptlessness, cluelessness. There’s intercourse with a subject-matter that is unremittingly imperfect. The conversation with material that doesn’t answer back. There’s the absolute soundlessness that ruins everything, the absolute despair from which you can no longer extricate yourself. There’s the imaginary prospect that you have built for yourself in order to be able to keep only imagining it. There’s the attempt to brush up against objects that dissolve the moment you think you could have touched them. There’s intercourse with actualities that turn out to be shams. There’s the attempt to piece back together a period of time that was never unified. There’s always the same groping in your imagination towards a representation of things that by its very nature must prove false. There’s your identification with things that have emerged out of sentences, and you know neither anything about sentences nor anything about things, and time and again you know pretty much nothing at all.