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Correction (novel)
Encyclopedia
Correction is a novel by Thomas Bernhard
, originally published in German
in 1975, and first published in English
translation in 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf
.
Correction’s set is a garret
in the middle of an Austrian
forest, described by the narrator as the "thought dungeon" in which the main character, Roithamer, will pursue his project of constructing an extraordinary habitation, the Cone, as a present for his beloved sister. Roithamer is deeply attached to his sister; this does not, however, prevent his provoking her death, which occurs on the very day that she moves into this conic house that he has built for her with formidable effort, in the Kobernausser forest. Roithamer has unwittingly killed his sister by forcing her to inhabit a house
that was completely contrary to her own nature.
, her traumatic death on entering the Cone. This cone (see it as you will -- a multitude of symbols, such as a refuge, a mausoleum
, a phallic
icon, the perfect mathematical centre of existence and thought
, etc.) is then destined to disappear, absorbed by an invading Nature
, eternal nemesis. A typical Bernhardian maniacal character, Roithamer corrects his building project ad infinitum, and ultimately corrects it to its extreme self-correction: suicide
. Correction unravels between love
and spite, humanity and degradation, hypocrisy
and violence, sickness and death, in a crescendo that brings madness to a dramatic threshold of absolute lucidity.
telling Roithamer’s story in the second person; the last part opens with the narrator still nominally telling Roithamer’s story in the second person, but gradually begins to speak directly in Roithamer’s voice, reading portions of his manuscript, where a sort of diary was kept whilst planning and building the Cone. This manuscript was in fact the focus of Roithamer's thousands of corrections, and it becomes apparent that it is being rewritten, “corrected” once again, this time through the voice of the narrator
, who begins, ominously, to disappear into the language
of the text. Roithamer’s story becomes increasingly obsessive and mad as it describes the construction of the Cone and the death of his sister. It concludes with the rationalisation of suicide, ending with the sentence, “The end is no process. Clearing,” and the narrator’s own voice totally dissolved into the text.
Bernhard used Ludwig Wittgenstein
’s biography to intersperse aspects of Roithamer’s life with similarities and create at times a parallel narration. Wittgenstein was born into great wealth, went to Cambridge
, lived austerely, worked obsessively, and spent years carefully designing and building a house for his sister (currently the Bulgarian Cultural Institute
in Vienna
: Haus Wittgenstein). Other elements of Roithamer come from Bernhard’s own troubled life: his love of the Austrian countryside, his hate of the Austrian state (in his famous will, he prohibited the publication or production of any of his works in Austria
), and the bitter relationship with his mother.
’s or that of Samuel Beckett
: this book proves them correct. But Bernhard’s style has its own peculiarities, a profoundly innovative form, and a much darker edge. Whilst the characters and situations in Correction are as comical and sometimes as absurd as those of the above two modernists
, they are also based on historical reality and a precise geography
. As a result, there is a surprising weight and closeness to the existential ground his characters ultimately tread upon. When Bernhard’s satire
bends into horror
as the novel progresses, there is little allegorical
distance for the reader to retreat into. The culminating tragedy feels both personal and claustrophobic
.
.
Thomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...
, originally published in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
in 1975, and first published in English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
translation in 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
.
Correction’s set is a garret
Garret
A garret is generally synonymous in modern usage with a habitable attic or small living space at the top of a house. It entered Middle English via Old French with a military connotation of a watchtower or something akin to a garrison, in other words a place for guards or soldiers to be quartered...
in the middle of an Austrian
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
forest, described by the narrator as the "thought dungeon" in which the main character, Roithamer, will pursue his project of constructing an extraordinary habitation, the Cone, as a present for his beloved sister. Roithamer is deeply attached to his sister; this does not, however, prevent his provoking her death, which occurs on the very day that she moves into this conic house that he has built for her with formidable effort, in the Kobernausser forest. Roithamer has unwittingly killed his sister by forcing her to inhabit a house
House
A house is a building or structure that has the ability to be occupied for dwelling by human beings or other creatures. The term house includes many kinds of different dwellings ranging from rudimentary huts of nomadic tribes to free standing individual structures...
that was completely contrary to her own nature.
Plot summary
The Austrian main character Roithamer, lecturer at Cambridge, after years of paroxystic projects, builds for his sister, the only person he ever loved, a house in the shape of a cone, right in the geometrically precise middle of the Kobernausser forest. Her answer to the present is deathDeath
Death is the permanent termination of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Phenomena which commonly bring about death include old age, predation, malnutrition, disease, and accidents or trauma resulting in terminal injury....
, her traumatic death on entering the Cone. This cone (see it as you will -- a multitude of symbols, such as a refuge, a mausoleum
Mausoleum
A mausoleum is an external free-standing building constructed as a monument enclosing the interment space or burial chamber of a deceased person or persons. A monument without the interment is a cenotaph. A mausoleum may be considered a type of tomb or the tomb may be considered to be within the...
, a phallic
Phallus
A phallus is an erect penis, a penis-shaped object such as a dildo, or a mimetic image of an erect penis. Any object that symbolically resembles a penis may also be referred to as a phallus; however, such objects are more often referred to as being phallic...
icon, the perfect mathematical centre of existence and thought
Thought
"Thought" generally refers to any mental or intellectual activity involving an individual's subjective consciousness. It can refer either to the act of thinking or the resulting ideas or arrangements of ideas. Similar concepts include cognition, sentience, consciousness, and imagination...
, etc.) is then destined to disappear, absorbed by an invading Nature
Nature
Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general...
, eternal nemesis. A typical Bernhardian maniacal character, Roithamer corrects his building project ad infinitum, and ultimately corrects it to its extreme self-correction: suicide
Suicide
Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...
. Correction unravels between love
Love
Love is an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. In philosophical context, love is a virtue representing all of human kindness, compassion, and affection. Love is central to many religions, as in the Christian phrase, "God is love" or Agape in the Canonical gospels...
and spite, humanity and degradation, hypocrisy
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is the state of pretending to have virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have. Hypocrisy involves the deception of others and is thus a kind of lie....
and violence, sickness and death, in a crescendo that brings madness to a dramatic threshold of absolute lucidity.
Imagery and themes
The first part of the book has the narratorNarrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
telling Roithamer’s story in the second person; the last part opens with the narrator still nominally telling Roithamer’s story in the second person, but gradually begins to speak directly in Roithamer’s voice, reading portions of his manuscript, where a sort of diary was kept whilst planning and building the Cone. This manuscript was in fact the focus of Roithamer's thousands of corrections, and it becomes apparent that it is being rewritten, “corrected” once again, this time through the voice of the narrator
Narrator
A narrator is, within any story , the fictional or non-fictional, personal or impersonal entity who tells the story to the audience. When the narrator is also a character within the story, he or she is sometimes known as the viewpoint character. The narrator is one of three entities responsible for...
, who begins, ominously, to disappear into the language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
of the text. Roithamer’s story becomes increasingly obsessive and mad as it describes the construction of the Cone and the death of his sister. It concludes with the rationalisation of suicide, ending with the sentence, “The end is no process. Clearing,” and the narrator’s own voice totally dissolved into the text.
Allusions/references to actual events
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
’s biography to intersperse aspects of Roithamer’s life with similarities and create at times a parallel narration. Wittgenstein was born into great wealth, went to Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, lived austerely, worked obsessively, and spent years carefully designing and building a house for his sister (currently the Bulgarian Cultural Institute
Bulgaria
Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...
in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
: Haus Wittgenstein). Other elements of Roithamer come from Bernhard’s own troubled life: his love of the Austrian countryside, his hate of the Austrian state (in his famous will, he prohibited the publication or production of any of his works in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
), and the bitter relationship with his mother.
Narrative style
Literary critics often compare Bernhard’s writing with Franz KafkaFranz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
’s or that of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
: this book proves them correct. But Bernhard’s style has its own peculiarities, a profoundly innovative form, and a much darker edge. Whilst the characters and situations in Correction are as comical and sometimes as absurd as those of the above two modernists
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, they are also based on historical reality and a precise geography
Geography
Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...
. As a result, there is a surprising weight and closeness to the existential ground his characters ultimately tread upon. When Bernhard’s satire
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
bends into horror
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
as the novel progresses, there is little allegorical
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
distance for the reader to retreat into. The culminating tragedy feels both personal and claustrophobic
Claustrophobia
Claustrophobia is the fear of having no escape and being closed in small spaces or rooms...
.
Author's Quote
The art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable. -- T. BernhardThomas Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was an Austrian novelist, playwright and poet. Bernhard, whose body of work has been called "the most significant literary achievement since World War II," is widely considered to be one of the most important German-speaking authors of the postwar era.- Life :Thomas Bernhard was...
.
External links
- Haus Wittgenstein, the house built by Ludwig WittgensteinLudwig WittgensteinLudwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
for his sister Margarethe Stonborough-Wittgenstein, in Vienna (Austrian website in GermanGerman languageGerman is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
).