.), Invention of Images, Milan, Mimesis International, 2016, pp. 113-126.

Homo Pictor.

Ekphrasis as frontier of the image in Thomas Bernhard ' Frost by Giuseppe Di Liberti Strauch the surgeon from the hospital of Schwartzach, a small Austrian town on the border with Switzerland, just a few kilometres from Lake Constance, secretly entrusts a young studentthe narrator whose name we will never knowto go to Weng, a village in Upper Austria, to observe the conduct of his brother, Strauch the painter. Frost, Thomas Bernhard v , published in 1963, presents the observations made by the young student during his twenty seven day mission in Weng, a place « y ; v » 1 . «Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it» 2 . These are the only words of Strauch the surgeon reported by the narrator, before setting out on his voyage and before the long ramblings of Strauch the painter prevail over his ability to observe an undefined illness. This phrase works as a clue and is directed at the reader at least as much as it is at the young student of medicine. Indeed, it is not rare for Bernhard to place clues of this type in the early pages 3 .

In this way, we have summarised the basic plot of Bernhard v w ree elements at the centre of our brief analysis:

, the landscape of Weng and the role of the young student as witness.

This analysis has two main aims: (1) to consider a special mode of notional ekphrasis which for the sake of brevity we will call here iconoclastic ekphrasis; (2) to verify how painting representation methods can be used as a model for the structure of the novel 4 .

Strauch is a painter who abandoned painting some years ago but, despite this renunciation, cannot but continue to be a painter. All his actionsthe long walks, his use of the stickmay be considered as an extension of his painting activity where the possibility itself of producing images is denied, due to an inauspicious form of Platonism on one hand and due to the flatness of the landscape on the other hand. For Strauch, recourse to verbal description is the inevitable and extreme consequence of the painting process and it is in this sense that the ekphrastic process played out in Frost is seen to be paradoxical and iconoclastic: he constructs verbal images to state the impossibility and the failure of the pictorial image. We can read in this way not just the moments in which Strauch describes what he sees or imagines, but the entirety of his movements in the landscape of Weng and it is in this sense that his irremediably being a homo pictor offers a narrative structure to the entire novel. In the Preface to the Italian edition of Frost, Pier Aldo 1 Thomas Bernhard, Frost, Frankfurt a. M., Insel Verlag, 1963; English translation by Michael Hofmann, Frost, New York, Vintage International, 2008, digital edition, p. 12. 2 Ibid., p. 14. 3 Emilio Garroni, in an essay of his dedicated to Korrektur, writes: «A clue that the theme [of Altensam, the town where the main characters in the novel were born] is central can be traced right from the first page of the novel, where it appears in the reference of the title to a manuscript left by Roithamer, who committed suicide, which the narrator friend is consulting, alongside other texts and drawings: "With regard to Altensam and everything which is connected to Altensam, with particular reference to the cone"» (Emilio Garroni, Un esempio di interpretazione testuale: Thomas Bernhard Rovatti writes: «Re-reading Frost, I often had the desire to draw, perhaps with a small and schematic drawing, the map of the place, as you do when you enter a new house in order to have an idea of the location and the size of the rooms, the corridors and the balconies […] I would like to be able to draw this map, which I can see precisely in my head, but I think, then, that every reader of Frost certainly creates his own one, and that each one is probably different from the others» 5 . It is precisely this possibility of mapping the movements of Strauch which articulate the narrative scheme of Frost.

We can add a third aim which deserves a full accurate historic-literary study which, thenfor reasons of space and non-relevancewe can only refer to here. Not only does Frost represent one of the best Austrian examples of anti-Heimatroman 6 but, through the use of these three functional elementsand, of course, not just through these 7 -Bernhard clearly overturns a Biedermeier literature not without formative purposes, with Adalbert Stifter being an exemplary representative. In Old Masters, it is no coincidence that Bernhard gives Reger, the main character observed by a narrator, a ferocious invective against Stifter: «If ever there was such a concept as tasteless, dull and sentimental and pointless literature, then i

x y w S w S writing is no art, and what he has to say is dishonest in the most revolting fashion» 8 and continues in this way for a few pages before moving onto the more well-known yet no less cruel pages against Heidegger («Just as Stifter has totally and in the most shameless manner kitschified great literature, so Heidegger, the Black Forest philosopher Heidegger, has kitschified philosophy… 9 ). Within Reger w w v w e for reading Frost:

«S w y x N v S v
[…] S makes nature monotonous and his characters insensitive and insipid, he knows nothing and he invents nothing, and he describes, because he is solely a describer and nothing else, he describes with boundless ïv q y … » 10 .

Stifter, indeed, was also a painter of landscapes (Der Königssee mit dem Watzmann, oil on canvas, 1837, Vienna Österreichische Galerie), urban views (Blick in die Beatrixgasse, oil on cloth, 1839, Vienna Schubert-Geburtshaus) and ruins (Ruine Wittinghausen, oil on canvas, 1833-35, Vienna Schubert-Geburtshaus), R v v w extended to his paintings. As Timothy Malchow has emphasised, Frost can be read as an inverted Austrian Bildungsroman11 and this inversion, we may add, is systematic and involves all the levels 5 Pier Aldo Rovatti, Contagio, preface to Thomas Bernhard, Gelo, Turin, Einaudi, 2008, p. IX. 6 J.J.Long, 'B , ', in Landmarks in the German Novel 2, ed. by Peter Hutchinson and Michael Minden, " I S " 47 Ox 2010 7-24, p. 9: «The status of Frost as a landmark novel, then, needs to be understood against a cultural backdrop dominated by a generally provincial orientation and by modes of dissemination that privileged small-scale ephemera. Beyond this, it also needs to be seen as a response to a cultural genre whose roots lie in the late nineteenth century, but which continued to play a major role in the immediate post-war years: the Heimatroman. of construction of the novel. In particular in Frost, Bernhard defines a statute of description which will run through all his work and which, perhaps, finds it best exemplification in Old Masters.

Every two days for about thirty years, Reger goes to the 'Bordone R Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to look at White-bearded man looking for a clear error which makes looking at it bearable («the complete and perfect are basically abhorrent to us» 12 ). Michele Cometa shows how the descriptions of paintings in Old Masters reveal the relationship between ekphrasis and narration: «The paintings in this novel are basically a " place" they exist precisely because words (and music) seems to never reach them; they act, they " " v w

[…] but they communicate nothing » 13 . If in Old Masters paintings are words, in Frost it is words which absorb the visual dimension and become paintings 14 . Cometa continues: «Bernhard is careful not to describe, but it is precisely for this reason that he reveals "his" paintings in their un-describability, as an unresolved residue within the narration, referring to them and illustrating them» 15 . And he concludes: «In the novel we witness the systematic demolition of all the claims of positive integration between the arts and between the arts and life […] and we know […] that no ontological claim can be satisfied by painting, either in terms of mimesis, however platonically abhorred, or in terms of re-creation» 16 .

And yet, this itinerary for the dissolution of the image already starts in Bernhard v : word and image appear to be irremediably divided and the rambling which follows the loss of the image cannot be but destined for failure. To borrow the words of Gottfried Boehm, Bernhard seems to summarise the lesson of modernity «which consists of the growing distance which separates word and image» 17 .

If Regen seems to accurately avoid the masterpieces housed in the Kunsthistorisches Museum to prefer more forgotten works, the only pictorial reference in Frost is, indeed, to one of the masterpieces of the Viennese museum, «a river landscape by Breughel the Elder», almost certainly The hunters in the snow (oil on wood, 117x162 cm, 1565) 18 . This is a work whose reception is not study his supervisor's deranged brother, the former painter Strauch, in the Alpine village of Weng and to report back secretly on his condition. The narrator's interactions with Strauch so transform him that he finally loses his very sense of identity. Several scholars have previously noted Frost's intertextual allusions to the Bildungsroman genre and to Stifter's Der Nachsommer specifically. Bernhard's appropriation of Der Nachsommer enabled him to participate in emerging narratives of Austrian national identity that relied upon Stifter's work as an iconic artefact. In Frost, Strauch's unresolved, unspecified traumas and his concomitant tendency to see butchery as an irrepressible feature of the Alpine landscape prevent him from forming a meaningful identity». 12 Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters, cit. 13 Michele Cometa, Parole che dipingono. letteratura e cultura visuale tra Settecento e Novecento, Rome, Meltemi, 2004, p. 153. The contribution proposed here owes much to the pages which Cometa dedicates to Old Masters, in the last chapter, with the significant title La visione estinta, of Parole che dipingono (re-proposed, then, in La scrittura delle immagini. Letteratura e cultura visuale, Milan, Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2012). We refer to this for a rich and accurate analysis of the ekphrastic methods adopted by Bernhard in Old Masters. 14 Rovatti again emphasises: «Strauch sees the words: this claim, which seems to be ridiculous, will become a key motif in Bernhard q v , and will be his famous words written in italics, italics as visualisation of things» (Pier Aldo Rovatti, Contagio, cit., pp. X-XI). 15 18 In reality, Bernhard, as we will see, does not offer a detailed description of the painting and the Kunsthistorisches Museum houses, as well as The hunters in the snow and many other works by Bruegel the Elder, another two paintings in the series of five Months: The gloomy day or February (oil on wood, 118x163 cm, 1565) and The return of the herd or November (oil on wood, 117x159 cm, 1565), both river landscapes. The hunters, as well as being the only snowy landscape of the three, seems to be the one which corresponds best to the human condition described by the narrator. without interesting contradictions: on one hand, it is an image used (perhaps too much) for serene Christmas cards [START_REF] Martin | Looking at the face of the Earth[END_REF] , on the other hand, explored by Tarkovskij in Solaris (USSR, 1972, colour, sound, 165min), referred to in the construction of the shots of The mirror (USSR, 1975, b/w colour, sound, 108min), again by Tarkovskij, shot by Lars von Trier in the prologue of Melancholia (Denmark, Germany, France, Sweden, Italy, 2011, colour, 130min) to the notes W overture Tristan and Isolde. Or again by William Carlos Williams who, in the last of his collections Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems of 1962, has to dedicate a poem to The hunters 20 .

Forgive the long quotation, but this page of Frost, appearing right in the middle of the novel, manages to bring together many of the matters discussed here: «Watching him now, I thought a little puff of wind would be enough to knock him over. When he stopped, he marked the ground with his stick, Indian signs, he told me, that are incomprehensible to me. Some of these signs remind me of animals, a cow for instance, a pig; others are shaped like temples, or the courses of rivers. Circles. Other geometrical forms. Even up where I was, I could hear him muttering to himself. Like an old general talking to himself, and then turning to the army that will always be there in his imagination. And he looked, too, like someone bending over a staff map, with everything on it down to the least detail depending on hi. He was talking in foreign languages as well. Asian words and scraps were flying through the air. The whole scene, with him the focus of it, reminded me of a painting I saw y K ; I v in: a river landscape by Breughel the Elder, where people are trying to find distraction from death, in which they are successful, but only, as the picture seems to be saying, at the price of infinite torments in Hell. The black of the tree stump, which shaded into the black of the j pants and his stick, was finally picked up the black of the mountain peaks» [START_REF] Bernhard | [END_REF] .

The nature which Strauch and the student are passing through is deeply historical, but in the sense by which, according to Benjamin, in German tragic drama, when «the hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath of this world» [START_REF] Benjamin | The Origin of German Tragic Drama, English translation[END_REF] , history dissolves within natural phenomena [START_REF] Dowden | Bernhardian nature must be understood as a metaphorical transposition of history[END_REF] . The traces of war and its horrors seem to be inscribed in the landscape, precisely as ruins which escape the linearity of history but never stop reminding. Not only because the corpses of the soldiers are still to be found beneath the snow and the pine needles but, above all, because «Nothing, not one thing, was mute. Everything continually expres " y w "» [START_REF] Bernhard | [END_REF] . History is rooted in the landscape and the landscape resists all forms of progress. When, for example, one of the recurrent characters, an engineer who supervises the construction of a power station, focuses our attention on the time of modern civilisation, on the progress of machines and energy and on the idea of the future, he appears to be extraneous-especially to the eyes of the painter -to the crystallised time of the inn in Weng where the painter and the student are staying.

In this landscape, Strauch could disappear at any time. He himself is a creature in ruins. His obsession for illness, the constant aspiration for suicide, reveal not so much the desire to get away from life-which he has already renounced by his exile to Wengbut the desire to become a corpse, to reduce his very history to a natural phenomenon of decay. The student sees, in this landscape, Strauch w w , as we read in the final words of the novel, from the pages of a newspaper: «The unemployed man G. Strauch from V. has not been seen in Weng or environs since last Thursday. In view of the heavy snowfalls currently being experienced there, the search for the missing person, in which members of the police also took part, has had to be called off»25 . The landscape of Frost is extremely topographic26 and, at the same time, borderless, without orientation, and thereby denies the very possibility of the visual representation of memory. «Bernhard's narrative seems to call up the founding myth of mnemotechnique, in which death sets off the work of memory. What is to be remembered in and for the present is disfigured» 27 . Just as if the relationship between signs and meanings was irrevocably broken down.

Strauch uses his stick to draw (indecipherable) signs in the snow. At times, the stick seems to be a substitute for a brush, at times a real prosthesis in the sense given by Jaspers 28 . «Without my stick, I y w v !» 29 , Strauch says. The stick is above all the instrument of hypotyposis: it designs signs of maps 30 , it indicates the path or the direction 31 or the landscape to be observed. Here we are using the term hypotyposis in its broadest sense, summarised well in 1830 by Fontanier: « hypotypose è v v q q q q y x ê une scène vivante» 32 . As an instrument of hypotyposis, for Strauch, the stick is an identifying element and, in a certain way, an iconographic element. With his stick, Strauch spatialises the image, renders it factual, makes it a thing. But the signs which Strauch reveals with his stick are already inscribed in nature. The extreme attention in tracing the signs in the snow leads him to «Asian words and scraps were flying through the air». But it is not so much a case of an Asian language, but the language of nature: « w v x " hing verbal v " w w and the deep snow» 33 .

The scene with Strauch absorbed drawing with his stick reminds the student of Brueghel The hunters in the snow. A Christmas card, as we said. A card if, in a small-sized reproduction, we lose the minute details of Bruegel the cartographer. To the left of the hunters and their dogs, there is an inn with a deer sign. The sign contains the emblem of Saint Eustachiusprotector of gamekeepers -, who converted to Christianity after finding a crucifix transfixed in the body of a deer. W ü engraving of Saint Eustachius from 1501, Brueghel would appear to expand the perspective, keeping the iconographic traits. In front of the inn, men at a fire are singeing the pig they have just finished slaughtering, as shown by the wooden vat. In the background, on the icy river, other men seem to be playing on the ice.

  The Austrian Heimatroman or rural novel, as exemplified in the work of the nineteenth-century writers Ludwig Anzengruber (1839-89) and Peter Rosegger (1843-1918), celebrated rural and agricultural life, community, rootedness, and tradition, and books by Heimatdichter

	y	1950 A	; […] I		1960 v Die Wolfshaut is generally identified as the first
	anti-				Also see Joseph A. Federico, Heimat, death and the other in
	Thomas Bernhard's "Frost" and "Verstörung"	"	A		" 29 1996)	3-4, pp. 223-242.
	7 For a thorough comparison -to which we will return -between Nachsommer, S	Bildungsroman and
	Frost, see Timothy B. Malchow, Thomas Bernhard's "Frost" and Adalbert Stifter: Literature, Legacy, and National
	Identity in the Early Austrian Second Republic	"	S	R v w"	28 N 1	2005)	65-84.

8

Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister. Komödie, Frankfurt A. M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985; English translation by Ewald Osers, Old Master, London, Penguin Classics, 2010 (1989 1 ), digital edition. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

  Ibid., p. 156. On the relationship between painting and narrative structure in Old Masters, also see Ingeborg Hoesterey, Visual Art as Narrative Structure. La svolta iconica, Rome,Meltemi, 2009, pp. 187-212, p. 191.

	Thomas Bernhard's Alte Meister	"	A		" 21
	(1988), Nr. 3/4, pp. 117-122.
	16 Ibid., p. 166.
	17 Gottfried Boehm, Bildsechreibung. Über die Grenzen von Bild und Sprache, in Id. e H. Pfotenhauer, a cura di,
	Beschreibungskunst -Kunstbeschreibung. Die Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Munich 1995, pp. 23-40;
	Italian translation by M. G. Di Monte and M. Di Monte,	z	' mm g	Su	f f	mm g
	linguaggio, in Id.,

Timothy B. Malchow, Thomas Bernhard's "Frost" and Adalbert Stifter, cit., p. 66: « Frost can be read as an inverted Austrian Bildungsroman. Its unnamed, first-person narrator is an impressionable young medical student who is sent to

Ibid., p. 279.

In a study focusing on the topographic dimension of Frost, Katya Krylova writes: «The Alpine topography in Frost, far from constituting a Heimat, is one characterized above all by a sense of Unheimlichkeit» ('Eine den Menschen

zerzausende Landschaft': Psychotopography and the Alpine Landscape in Thomas Bernhard's "Frost" "A S " 18 Austria and the Alps (2010), pp. 74-88, p. 76). 27 Bianca Theisen, The Art of Erasing Art. Thomas Bernhard " N" 121 N 3 I A 2006) pp. 551-562, p. 559. 28 Cfr. Karl Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie Berlin, Göttingen, Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, 1959. 29 Thomas Bernhard, Frost, cit., p. 275. 30 Ibid., p. 99. 31 Bernhard ekphrasis seems to be suspended between the mimetic dimension and the notional dimension 34 : the direct evocation of the painting overlaps immediately with an interpretation of the human condition represented and then passes fluidly, through the «black of the tree stump» to the portrait of the painter observed by the student. Here in this section, again, Bernhard dismantles the painting to reveal the limitsand the impossibilityof pictorial representation. Citing the work of Brueghel, Bernhard gives us a false centre using two strategies. Indeed, he does not report the title of the painting and the description offered could also refer to other paintings by Brueghel housed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, at least to the other two in the Months cycle. But, above all, the description of the scene portrayed in the painting is distributed within other parts of the novel, including elements present in the other two paintings of the Dutch master, as if, in the memory, the three paintings merged. We refer, in particular, to two other moments in Frost. In the first, after a deliberate fire has devastated a farm and emergency slaughters of animals, Strauch himself says he is like a homo pictor: "Y " " y I y poetry, a line that will turn the world on its head, a so-called line against God, you understand me! This tree walks on from the left, the cloud comes on from the right, the cloud with its softer voice. I view myself as the creator of this afternoon drama, this tragedy! This comedy! Now listen, the music has come y w y w […] y my theatre? y ? -self-sufficiency? What Go ?" 35 Towards the end of the novel, the scene of the slaughter returns in a sub-chapter entitled The Animal Rustling Scum in which Strauch has discovered in the wood traces of blood from a clandestine slaughter. And he again claims his painting activity on the landscape: The word here literally takes the place of the image and imposes itself as the ultimate consequence of the visual construction of the scene. The image reveals the vulgarity and the obscenity of the massacre. At times almost the comicality. Strauch is divided between word and image as he is divided between tragic and comic.

In this sense, it appears to be appropriate to speak of an iconoclastic ekphrasis: a description of an image or a visual work which aims to demonstrate the impossibility for the image itself to contain the sense of what is represented. The consequence of this process is that words also become things and things to be seen: inscriptions in nature, natural histories which are ever-increasingly hard to decipher.

Both the paradoxical statute of ekphrasis and the construction of Strauch as homo pictor who cannot paint push us, in conclusion, to ascertain how articulate and complex the structural and thematic homologies between text and image are in Frost, to the point of sometimes rendering themes and structure inextricable. The ontological critique of the nature of the image is combined with Stifter q the description of " autiful nature" and translates as a narration which is broken constantly before the fragmentariness and alongside the immensity of the natural phenomena. When, for example, Strauch imagines a park in which «Plants and music would follow 34 Michele Cometa, Letteratura e arti figurative: Un catalogo " " 3 2005 15-29, p. 20: «In the case of literary ekphrasis, the distinction between mimetic ekphrasis, that is, that which starts from an artistic product which actually exists or existed and notional ekphrasis w ' j first time, is also decisive». 35 Thomas Bernhard, Frost, cit., pp. 169-170. 36 Ibid., p. 246. in lovely mathematical alternation», he also reveals the impossibility of crossing it, of passing from one meadow «island» to the next: "I w ter that prevents one from hopping from one island to another. In my imagining. On the piece of grass which one has w y y w w w y " w y "O w w y y"» 37 . In the same way, Strauch topographies design the structure of the narration of the novel. In this sense, the thematic homologies between the images dreamed, indicated, constructed verbally, evoked, traced with the stick and the text also become structural homologies. «European culturewrote Boehmhas progressively increased the collection of images and with this the kingdom of presence too», gradually doing away with the space of the absent. «In the beautiful and new world of simulation -Boehm continueswe are actually working so that one day we can completely eliminate this space» 38 . The renunciation of images by Strauch the painter is an act of revenge aiming to preserve and legitimise a space of absence. The resulting paradox is that the descriptions, rather than bringing text and image closer, actually serve to mark out the limits of representation in both. 37 Ibid., p. 76. 38