Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher: Newtonian Realities and Deterministic Chaos
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wertheimer war nicht imstande, sich selbst als ein Einmaliges zu sehen, wie es sich jeder leisten kann und mus, will er nicht verzweifeln, gleich was fur ein Mensch, er ist ein einmaliger, sage ich selbst mir immer wieder und bin gerettet. T hree music students , aspiring virtuosos all, become acquainted at a master class of the celebrated pianist Horowitz. The brilliant performance and career of one of them, named after the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, leaves the ambitions of the other two, Wertheimer and the narrator, in shambles. Der Untergeher consists of complex loops of ruminations in which the narrator tries to come to terms with his role in Wertheimer's suicide and with his own precarious existence after the encounter with Glenn Gould. As with all of Thomas Bernhard's prose, fact and fiction form an explosive composite in a setting notable for its constructedness. An agglomerate of sharp-edged fragments, recognizable and sometimes wildly exaggerated bits of the real world, are designed to appear in the matrix of the text, ready to burst and cut. Comparing venerable institutions to bordellos and their dignitaries to pimps, for example, makes for piquant copy and controversy. In no small measure Thomas Bernhard's notoriety in the popular press stems from realistic readings of such passages in his books. Bernhard's Glenn Gould provides the realistic focus for Der Untergeher . He has so much in common with his famous namesake that some reviews have the real Glenn Gould die at his Steinway while playing Bach's Goldberg Variations — the dramatic death of Bernhard's fictive Gould. In fact, Gould suffered a stroke and died some days later when the life support systems were shut off. Some biographical works on Gould mention this “novel of sorts” for the sake of documentary completeness or to buttress an enthusiasm for Glenn Gould's accomplishments as a concert pianist. Less referential approaches tend to foreground Wertheimer as a tragic figure who fails to achieve artistic perfection. In their quest for meaning, such interpretations illuminate salient aspects of the narrative without, however, engaging its conspicuous structure. Uwe Betz compiles a table of characteristics for the three figures to show that the narrative is constituted of the permutations of their differences and similarities. Such analysis undoubtedly has validity, but it is not clear that it helps the reader in understanding the text better.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".