Correction by Thomas Bernhard

First published:Korrektur, 1975 (English translation, 1979)

Type of work: Philosophical novel

Time of work: The early 1970’s

Locale: Altensam, an estate in Austria

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, a sickly individual who is obsessed with reconstructing Roithammer’s posthumous work
• Roithammer, a brilliant man who is obsessed with constructing a round building and with writing a treatise on his native village
• Holler, a taxidermist from whom Roithammer rents a room

The Novel

Correction is a first-person narrative written, as is typical of many of Thomas Bernhard’s works, in one sustained statement that has no paragraph divisions. The first of its two sections contains the ruminations of the unnamed narrator. The narrator, who is plagued with lung infections, meditates on the life and suicide of his friend, Roithammer, a brilliant and obsessed man. The narrator has moved into the attic apartment of his deceased friend; he tries to assemble the numerous notes that the latter had collected in his attempt to write a treatise on his life in Altensam, the Austrian estate where his brothers and sisters reside, and on his architectural plans to construct a round building in the woods for his deceased sister.

The second section represents the narrator’s paraphrase of his friend’s writings. Roithammer, once an outstanding student and tutor at the University of Cambridge, returned to the stifling and petty atmosphere of Altensam. For him, the community and its narrow attitudes became a kind of spiritual prison which eventually led to the taking of his own life in a clearing deep in the woods. He was an exceedingly intellectual individual whose interests included philosophy, mathematics, and modern music. He rented an attic apartment in the home of the taxidermist, Holler. Everyone considered the scholar somewhat of an eccentric. He planned, for example, to sell the family estate and to donate the proceeds to the inmates of the local prisons.

The second son of the family, Roithammer received his father’s huge inheritance and proceeded with a fantastic plan to design and build a round structure for his beloved sister. He constructed the edifice and, immediately thereafter, the sister died. He went back to England but soon returned and began to write his treatise in several, ever more succinct, versions. Isolated and in a profound despair, he took his own life.

Living in Holler’s attic room, the narrator becomes himself obsessed with the “correction” of his friend’s manuscripts and confronts his own desperation and despair. He becomes almost an alter ego of Roithammer and, like Roithammer, verges on the brink of suicide.

The Characters

The two main figures of Correction, the narrator and the deceased Roithammer, are again typical of many Bernhard characters, such as the obsessed Konrad of Das Kalkwerk (1970; The Lime Works, 1973) or the depressed narrator of Beton (1982; Concrete, 1984). All these individuals are highly intelligent, intellectual men driven by a desire to complete some great work. Roithammer and the others are fundamentally alienated from existence and look upon it with a certain detached horror. Roithammer’s concern with mathematics expresses his wish to construct a world which is logically pure and free of contradictions. His treatise is, in part, an attempt to analyze his childhood and the origins of his personality. Bernhard’s characters are acutely self-conscious individuals who constantly reflect upon the conditions of their existence. The death of Roithammer’s sister, ironically upon the completion of the structure he built for her, seems to be the pivotal point in his life, and his alienation culminates in his eventual self-destruction.

Bernhard’s method of characterization in Correction, as in many of his other novels, is somewhat indirect. Since the truth of any person’s existence is, at best, an elusive property, the description of an individual’s motivations and ideas must remain largely circumstantial. Truth is, in existential terms, not absolute or universally valid, but a function of the individual perspective of each person. Bernhard is also well aware that language, which is imprecise and misleading, often tends to obfuscate rather than clarify reality. Thus, he tends to characterize his figures obliquely, through the views of others. That places a greater burden on the reader to construct the character from the evidence presented, quite different from the more traditional techniques of characterization in novels that employ an omniscient narrator. In The Lime Works, for example, the story of Konrad and his wife is told through the views and opinions of neighbors and officials. In Correction, the reader learns of Roithammer’s life and death mostly indirectly through the observations of the narrator and through the account of his last weeks by the landlord, Holler. These are clearly biased accounts. The narrator both admires and fears Roithammer, whose powerful intellect has dominated his friend’s life. Holler admires and respects his tenant.

Conversely, what is known of the narrator is learned through his obsession with Roithammer. Even though the text is a monologue, the former’s personality is revealed only as a result of his attempt to explain his friend’s project and his suicide. Even in the last section, when the narrator comes to talk more of his own feelings, these thoughts are more a reflection of Roithammer’s personality, since the narrator himself seems at the brink of suicide. Living in the attic room where his friend spent his last days and obsessed with carrying out the latter’s revisions of his work, the narrator becomes Roithammer.

Critical Context

Correction, and all Bernhard’s writings, should be considered in the context of modern existential literature. The experience of the alienation of consciousness from being that pervades his texts is akin to the fundamental assumptions that inform the works of French existential writers and thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The former’s well-known novel, La Nausee (1938; Nausea, 1949), for example, highlights the same kind of experience that motivates Bernhard’s figures. Roquentin, the narrator of Sartre’s work, repeatedly confronts the brute otherness of existence and becomes, much like Roithammer and the narrator in Correction, a lone and solitary individual, estranged from society and from his own consciousness. Roquentin does not, however, commit suicide.

The issue of suicide also links Bernhard to Camus. In his famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” Camus suggests that, given the ultimate absurdity of human existence, the first question of any philosophy must be whether one commits suicide. If one rejects that alternative, then one turns to “revolt” against the meaninglessness of life. For Camus, the highest form of protest is art or “absurd creation,” the temporary transcendence afforded the individual through the creative use of the imagination. Art allows humankind, if even for only a moment, to escape the suffering that existence inevitably entails. This is closest to Bernhard’s project as author. He and his characters are engaged in the monumental effort to write, be it a novel or some great intellectual dissertation that stands as a revolt, a rejection of the despair that plagues them. Bernhard’s texts also carry a distinct resemblance, both in themes and style, to the writings of Samuel Beckett. They both create extended monologues of isolated characters who reflect upon the horror and absurdity of existence. Bernhard can justifiably be called an “Austrian Beckett.”

Within the tradition of modern German literature, Bernhard stands in close relation to earlier authors such as the pessimistic German poet Gottfried Benn and the unparalleled writer of existential alienation, his fellow Austrian Franz Kafka. Benn’s early poetry and novellas are some of the most nihilistic visions of the pointless suffering and horror engendered by human self-awareness in its confrontation with the indifference of existence. Bernhard has sometimes been referred to as a latter-day Kafka. The former’s themes—estrangement, despair, and acute self-awareness—are in the same vein as those of Kafka. Of contemporary German language writers, Bernhard also stands in close relation to the Austrian author Peter Handke, whose texts also deal with the themes of alienation and the search for transcendence through art.

Bibliography

Botond, Anneliese, ed. Uber Thomas Bernhard, 1970.

Dierick, A.P. “Thomas Bernhard’s Austria: Neurosis, Symbol, or Expedient?” in Modern Austrian Literature. XII (1979), pp. 73-93.

Fetz, Gerhard. “The Works of Thomas Bernhard: Austrian Literature?” in Modern Austrian Literature. XVII, nos. 3/4 (1984), pp. 171-192.

Meyerhofer, Nicholas. Thomas Bernhard, 1985.

Rietra, Madeleine. “Zur Poetik von Thomas Bernhards Roman Korrektur,” in In Sachen Thomas Bernhard, 1983. Edited by K. Bartsch, D. Goltschnigg, and G. Melzer.

Wolfschutz, Hans. “Thomas Bernhard: The Mask of Death,” in Modern Austrian Writing, 1980. Edited by A. Best and H. Wolfschutz.