Correction
Thomas Bernhard, translated by Sophie Wilkins
New York: Alfred A. Knopf
280 pages $10.00
Since Thomas Bernhard abandoned music study (if one can say of him that he ever abandoned any subject) to begin writing poetry in the late fifties, he has devoted himself to the unceasing composition of epitaphs for language and the spirit it has infected. Aware of the ultimate authority of silence, he has, nevertheless, brought forth in a torrent over half a dozen volumes of fiction, as many plays, poems, and three volumes of autobiography (which take him only to the age of eighteen). He seems to have had no period of apprenticeship. The brilliant and untranslatable Frost inaugurated work of such consistent distinction that at the age of forty-eight he has won almost every available German-language literary award and become something of an Austrian institution. All this is in spite of his reclusiveness (enforced, it is true, by a lung ailment), his regionalism, and his uncompromising pessimism-political, philosophical, medical.
He has not, however, been beyond controversy. Detractors, perhaps disconcerted by Bernhard’s ability to express in a single voice the consciences of oppressor, and victim, have labeled him a Nazi, which is certainly wrong, and an anarchist, which is probably accurate. The doctor is often accused by his patient of being the cause of a disease whose diagnosis he merely delivers.
Bernhard’s work is nourished by deep provincial roots, but Correction, the latest of his novels to be translated into English (Gargoyles and The Lime Works are out of print), makes it dramatically clear that these roots extend not only to a tradition represented by Novalis, Hofmannsthal, and Broch, but through such lives and works to a fully articulated myth of the modern artist.
At the outset Bernhard establishes his regional preoccupations through the story’s locale, a characteristic one. The landscape of Upper Austria, particularly around Wels, Gmunden, and his own Ohlsdorf, is a forbidding creation that includes man only as a malicious afterthought. Thick dark forests cover the mountainsides, terminating suddenly in roaring cataracts and gorges of vertiginous depth. In winter, snow and silence deepen the isolation of the hamlets and villages, and in spring, floods and slides devastate the lowlands and granges. The great estates of the countryside have fallen into decay, emblems of departed spiritual authority. The natives, meanwhile, inherit the consequences of unbroken solitude: madness, disease, sacramental nostalgia. The facts of nature quickly become the facts of mental life. This mysterious and deadly connection lies at the center of, Bernhard’s work. It also represents a tenet of faith among most Austrians:
With the help of the oppressive weather conditions in these foothills, here everybody is always inclined to suicide, everyone feels he is suffocating because he can’t change his situation in any way, in this landscape they all have a sense of being handicapped by their birth…
The protagonist of Correction, an embattled thinker named Roithamer, is a fact of this nature, “a brilliant phenomenon,” in every way a product of “the oppressive weather conditions.” Bernhard elevates his regionalism to a typical status by casting the significant details of Roithamer’s life and opinions after the model of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose name occurs only once in the novel. Like the originator of the Philosophical Investigations, Roithamer combines in one mind (head, Bernhard would say, to emphasize the sheer materiality of thought) diverse impulses to form. As a geneticist, builder, music scholar, and philosopher, he has lived a monastic existence in both Cambridge and Austria, in martyrdom to thinking. His absolute conviction that “unless one is thinking of everything at each moment, one is not thinking at all,” culminates in a heroic project requiring six years of unremitting labor, whose written record, revised almost to extinction, comprises in the end no more than a vast pile of fragments. (Wittgenstein, who composed by “notes”—Bemerkungen—anticipated a similar fate for his work. In his ambivalence about the coherence of any text, he designated the pages of his notebooks as Zettel, “slips,” as though they were never to be bound.)
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