Resisting Bernhard: Women and Violence in Das Kalkwerk, Ja, and Auslöschung
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It might initially appear problematical to discuss the violence of Thomas Bernhard's novels specifically in conjunction with women. Most of his texts, after all, represent acts of natural violence and random death whose victims are male, most strikingly in the short prose pieces that constitute Der Stimmenimitator (1978). Two episodes from Frost (1963), however, will clarify what is at stake in the question of Bernhard, women and violence. There are two deaths in the central part of the novel: a Holzzieher falls from his horse-drawn sledge and is run over (Bernhard, Frost 227-8); and the wife of a farmer, whose house is on fire, is crushed to death by a falling roof joist (Bernhard, Frost 185-7). Within the narrative economy, both deaths are motivated by both the exigencies of – in so far as they lead to the funeral episodes in which the narrator is again confronted with the unfamiliar mode of rural, mountain life – and by considerations of character in that they allow more information to be imparted about the lives and attitudes of the Wirtin and Strauch. Yet there are crucial differences between the two deaths. The Holzzieher is a victim of pure contingency, whereas the death of the farmer's wife is the result of human agency. It emerges that the fire in the farm house had been started by the Bauernknecht, who had had a relationship with the farmer and carried out the arson attack as a form of sexual revenge, erroneously believing that the farmer's insurance policy on the property was not due to mature until the following day. In addition, once the woman has been killed, she is trampled over by (male) rescuers who believe that she is still inside the house and cannot see her corpse in the dark. It is this excess of violence, unmotivated by plot or psychology, that sets the episode apart from the death of the Holzzieher. The relationship between violence and the feminine in Bernhard is characterized by male agency, excess, and often also displaced sexuality. This article firstly expounds a critical model that facilitates a nuanced consideration of the representation of violence towards women in Bernhard's
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".