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From An Abandoned Homage To Thomas Bernhard | Jun 03 2007

I’ve never liked the word cunt. It’s nasty and crude. Not that pussy is any better. Cunt seems demeaning, while pussy seems—what?—silly. I can never decide which of the two to use in my diary. I try cunt for a time, then switch to pussy, then return to cunt again, sometimes in a single sentence. Neither word seems right for very long.

In desperation I have occasionally tried using vagina. However, vagina is so medical-sounding that I invariably cross it out. My diary is littered with sentences in which I’ve drawn a line through the word vagina and written cunt or pussy in the space above it.

A few times I’ve considered using the word sex, but sex is far too poetic-sounding, a poetry word. No one uses sex (meaning vagina) in everyday speech. Sex (meaning vagina) sounds ridiculous in everyday speech, it sounds like one is trying to be either lofty or vague, or both at once. It sounds poetical.

Baudelaire, if I’m not mistaken, used the word sex—or rather his translators did. Lord knows what word Baudelaire used.

Bernhard, by contrast, never once mentioned this part of the female anatomy. Of course I’m referring to that portion of Bernhard’s work that has been translated into English, because for all I know Bernhard used the German equivalent of cunt or pussy in one of his lesser plays or novels, or perhaps in one of his poems—not one of which has been translated into English!

At the same time I’m dubious, because nowhere in Bernhard’s translated work—twelve novels, three plays and a three-volume memoir—does he make reference, direct or otherwise, to sex. It’s true. Nowhere does anyone kiss anyone or try to kiss anyone or even remember kissing anyone. It simply doesn’t happen. Bernhard’s world is devoid of sex. The only possible exception is the scene in Bernhard’s last novel, Extinction, in which the naked protagonist encounters his spinster sister in the hall on the morning of their parents’ funeral, and sneers, Haven’t you seen a naked man before?

In a sense this is Bernhard’s only sex scene—his only scene, really: a repulsive man taunts his sister with his nakedness.