Contents

Cover

About the Book

About the Author

Also by Thomas Bernhard

Dedication

Title Page

Preface

Hoeller’s Garret

Sifting and Sorting

Copyright

About the Book

Roithamer, a character based on Wittgenstein, has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of pure thought. We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.

About the Author

Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931 but grew up in Austria. His interest in music and theatre led him to study at the Akademie Mozarteum in Salzburg. He has written a quantity of poetry, several novels, short stories and plays and three volumes of autobiography. Among the many European prizes he has won are the Bremen Prize, the Austrian National Prize and Le Prix Séguier. He died in 1989.

ALSO BY THOMAS BERNHARD
AVAILABLE IN VINTAGE

Gathering Evidence

For Carol Brown Janeway, heroic editor, and Patrick O’Brien, M.D., companion in furor Bernhardiensis to whom this translation is indebted for invaluable attentions and moral support. S.W.

Correction

Thomas Bernhard

Translated from the German by
Sophie Wilkins

With a Preface By
George Steiner

Preface

Two figures haunt the philosophic fictions of Thomas Bernhard. He saw in Glenn Gould the enacted mastery of meaning in music, a performative quality so intense, so disinterested in its unforced virtuosity, as to make of his playing of the piano a kind of absolute verity. Gould also represented two other major motifs in Bernhard’s unforgiving vision. The distance between Gould’s realisation of Bach or Beethoven and that of all other pianists, not to speak of amateurs, is so great that it makes the efforts of lesser executants not only perfectly absurd but somehow indecent. If one has heard Gould play, be it through a narrowly-opened door during Gould’s apprentice stay in Salzburg, the only condign response is to cease one’s own studies, to sell or pulp one’s piano and to “go under” (the title of the relevant fable) in lucid, suicidal silence.

The other bearer of perfect and, therefore, fatal tidings is Wittgenstein. It is the absolute purity, the translucent reticence of Wittgenstein’s method and style, which render fatuous not only the inflated meanderings of other modern thinkers, but the laboured, self-serving efforts of most other serious minds to think at all. Where a Wittgenstein has passed, the grass of silliness and of verbose vanity should not be allowed to grow again. The totemic rebuke which emanates from Wittgenstein’s ascetic genius is the more decisive for Bernhard in that it sprang from within and turned its back on loathed Austria. Even Wittgenstein’s Nephew (1982) inherits, in his own consequent extremity – is he the greater philosopher because he leaves no work, no fragment behind? – and incarnates that last judgement on Austria and on European modernity which is pivotal to Bernhard’s entire work.

Korrektur, to retain its graphically angular German title – those “k”s out of Kafka – appeared in 1975. Formally, it is Thomas Bernhard’s masterpiece and one of the pre-eminent novels in our century. Nowhere is Bernhard’s notorious prose, with its maddening, grating recursive and tidal motion, with its clipped understatements, with its bone-bleached economy, used to deeper purpose. Nowhere (and this is saying a great deal) is Bernhard’s power to construe a landscape of natural damnation – that of the black woods and deafening hill-streams of Carinthia – more persuasive. No translation, however obeissant, will quite render the cold crazed music, the dank but sometimes cutting sheen of light and ashen air in the original.

Though obliquely etched, the factual background matters. Almost harshly, Bernhard assumes that the reader will recognize and assess allusions to: Wittgenstein’s design and construction in Vienna of a house of uncompromising austerity and clarity of line for one of his sisters; to Wittgenstein’s sojourns in Cambridge; to his dual schooling in engineering and in mathematical logic; to the exasperated solitude (and rages) in his monk-like style of life. Like Wittgenstein, the Roithamer of the novel – in German there are cross-echoes of the subtlest and most suggestive sort between the two names – temporarily abandons his social and intellectual status in order to teach primary and secondary school-children in an abysmally backward Austrian hamlet. In both cases, the experiment fails cruelly. As with the great philosopher, so with Roithamer, the essential writings remain unpublished at the time of death, obscurely preserved in the “inferno” (in the Holler attic resides the German word for “Hell”). And although the depiction of the incomparable “Wittgenstein-Roithamer” is palpable, Bernhard entrusts this chronicle to an intermediary, a friend and posthumous witness whose judgements are themselves subject to the twilight and dubieties of a tortuous narration. There may be distant analogies here to the celebrated narrative interposition in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

A “correction of corrections of corrections of corrections” which is not ad infinitum simply because death punctuates. Variations on a single theme of inaccessible but lucidly perceived final rigour of thought and architectural conception. Like the grinding of the stream, Bernhard’s recital aims to produce the peculiar nausea which can arise out of obsession. Even the determination of the exact centre of the forest of Kobernauss – for how can the conical dwelling be erected at any other spot? – entails a maddening stress of repeated, amended, corrected mensuration. What is purposed is an absolute “thought-space” into whose inhuman and cellular asceticism Roithamer’s sister is to enter blindfold (the theme of brother-sister incest, spiritually construed, is ubiquitous in Thomas Bernhard). Inevitably and by virtue of a logic which both appalls and fulfills the builder, the “Cone” becomes his sister’s immediate tomb. His own suicide is an epilogue writ deep in the necessities and truths of his vision (two of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide and the master himself notes occasions on which he felt drawn to the very edge of self-destruction).

Yet, and this is the sombre magic of the novel, there is a bracing, energizing afterglow. The pulsing, sinewy strengths of Bernhard’s technique, the challenge Roithamer’s genius and exactions poses to the reader’s imaginative grasp, are positive. An episode, such as that of the “yellow rose” found among Roithamer’s papers, takes on a peculiar resonance, as of chivalric mercy. Is there any other fiction, with the possible exception of Valéry’s miniature Monsieur Teste that actually convinces us of a felt philosophic eminence? Too often, notably in his later writings, Bernhard succumbed to a monotone of hate (hate for Austria, for modern man, for the soiled materiality of being). Correction is a masterpiece precisely because the comeliness of logic and the menace of hallucination, the poetry of discretion and the cry of confessional anguish, are kept in equilibrium. The difficulties which the book causes, the imperative of re-reading implicit in its every line, are a compliment, no doubt somewhat chilling but intense none the less, to its readers.

George Steiner

February 1991

Hoeller’s Garret