Reason Read: Reading 1001 botm April 2023
This was my second book by Thomas Bernhard and the most painful so far. I don't think I will ever understand the point. The translator from German to English was Sophie Wilkins. The structure is two paragraphs 1) Heoeller's Garret and 2) Sifting and Sorting and many, many commas. The book is published by Vintage and the sentences which run on and on are also quite close together so this is part of what makes it painful to read.
In the first paragraph we have an unnamed narrator who has been appointed to be the main character's literary executor. The main character has died by suicide. The second paragraph is a conglomeration of the main character Roithamer's ideas about many subjects; child parent relationship (abusive mother), Eferding woman, suicide, marriage as annihilation, correcting, suicide as existential correction, etc.
Quotes;
", here everybody is always inclined to suicide, everyone feels he is suffocating because he can't change his situation in any way,"
"People always do whatever they do for themselves alone, only for themselves and never, in no instance, it is done for someone else's sake."
",I'll correct it all when the time for such correction has come and then I'll correct the corrections and correct again the resulting corrections andsoforth, so Roithamer, We're constantly correcting and correcting ourselves, most rigouously, because we recognize at ever moment that we did it all wrong..."
". we didn't really know all these people's characters, because their self-correction took us by surprise, otherwise we wouldn't have been surprised by their ultimate existential correction, their suicide,"
", the schools are gigantic institutions for the annihilation of the young, those who come to them for help are annihilated, but the state has its own good reason for financing the schools,"

These are interesting thoughts but that's all they are. There are symbols but what they stand for is mostly mystery; black birds that the taxidermist Hoeller is stuffing and the one on the wall, the Cone, The roar of the water as silence, the silence of Altensan disturbed by woodworms. I can sum it up by saying; "I don't get it". ( )

Typical Bernhard, (male) Narrator (completely invisible to all others) observes and transcribes a dialogue of some other (wealthy, Wittgensteinian male) speaker who speaks in relation to his relationship to another character or characters. Circumlocutionary dialectic which effaces itself, and here with the benefit that Act II directly obliterates the first. The novel problematic because it occasionally attempts to address the material directly .

any number of flaws which should destroy it: diversion on the mother, return of commentary to "standard prose" in the second act particularly in Roithamers so-called 'musings' in his dated diary entries, and discussion of Roithamer in the third person by Roithamer itself, though unclear whether it is the note that is being read or the commentary of the narrator, though it has to be in the note itself because this is not what the narrator says. introduction of suicide as a theme in the second act, while mentioned only in the briefest moment and also only tangentially in the first (not flaw). the continuation of that theme by which Roithamer suddenly seems to have peculiar and accurate situational understanding (antithetical to Bernhard text) in which he realizes the Cone will frighten his sister to death - rationalized because "death is supreme happiness" this is a so-called "Foreign Element in the Text," so to speak. Roithamer with self-awareness with regard to his craziness (precluded by genre of Bernhard). typical circumscription of subject which others find objectionable (music in Loser, art in Old Masters) and here with "statics" for architecture/building and "genetic mutations" for Science (and also "Allopolypoids"). Returning to contemplate the yellow rose as symbol, (should be jettisoned like Bernhard's invisible narrator, who Roithamer does not mention) "as long as we haven’t crossed the border, the extreme limits, we’re not crazy, so Roithamer. In contemplation of the yellow paper rose, nothing else (June 3)"

some good moments: exclusion of the narrator completely from Roithamer's section ("because I haven’t got a soul left, apart from Hoeller not a soul, left alone with myself in Hoeller’s garret," - begs the question where is narrator, to whom he has left his writings) mention of school as a destroyer in end of last section (without mention of the critical moment - the suicide of the teacher) mention of suicide of the uncle (completely neglected from narrator).

(funny trick of translation, 'close' with two different pronunciations) "people only come close and close in on you to ____ and ____ you"

maximum iteration "she’d have robbed Altensam of all that was left of its good name, so my father, so Roithamer, “all that was left” underlined, " - itself a quotation, read by the narrator, of Roithamer

more contradictions (fruit of the Bernhardian narrative):

-"stupidity and sickliness" - "sift and sort"

"lower middle class mentality of the Eferding woman" vs going down into the villages with the coal miners

Sister's nature being that of Altensam vs Roithamer despising Altensam (narrator) vs Roithamer loving sister (Roithamer/narrator) vs Roithamer hating Altensam (Narrator)

" It’s always clear from the first, what a newborn child is made of and where it is tending, it is always a tendency backward, a tendency of return,"

"a foreign element in Altensam" vs "the Eferding woman and the Eferding children in Altensam"

some amusing phrases:
"suddenly, as I sat down at the desk, I had the idea of building my sister the Cone, to give her the greatest happiness, as he immediately felt it would, and from that moment on the idea of making his sister supremely happy, by building her a cone to live in, had given him no peace and right there, sitting at that desk where I had never sat before, "

"a Cone as a habitation"

"Altensam and everything connected with Altensam with special attention to the Cone"

"there can be no doubt whatsoever that Roithamer’s sister was destroyed by the creation of the perfect Cone, "

funny? = "From my window up in the garret I kept watching Hoeller down there in his workshop stuffing that huge black bird, how he kept cramming it with more and more stuffing, I thought I’ll watch him from this excellent vantage point until he’s finished stuffing that bird, and so I stood there motionless for a good half hour until I saw that Hoeller had finished stuffing the bird. Suddenly Hoeller had thrown the stuffed bird down to the floor, he’d jumped up and run off into the back room where I couldn’t see him anymore, but I waited, looking into the workshop, until I could see Hoeller again, he came back and sat down on his chair again and went back to stuffing the bird, now I noticed a huge heap of polyurethane on the floor beside Hoeller’s chair and I thought this huge heap of polyurethane is now going to be crammed into this bird which I’d supposed had already been crammed full long since. By stuffing this bird he is making the night bearable for himself, I thought. At twelve he was still busy stuffing that bird." --> "Suddenly I saw, perhaps my eyes had become adjusted to the lighting down there in Hoeller’s workshop, or else the lighting had suddenly changed, anyway I saw several such huge birds, the back of Hoeller’s workshop was filled with such birds, not all of these great, indeed huge birds were equally large, not all of them were black, but these were absolutely no local birds, probably, I thought, these are birds from the collection of some bird fancier, one of those rich bird freaks who can afford to travel to America, to South America or to India, in order to shoot such huge birds and add them to his collection. A huge bird collection, I kept thinking, a huge bird collection, and I slapped my forehead as I thought again and again, a huge bird collection, a huge bird collection!"

he (me) "watching me, he can observe me very well when I show myself at the attic window, I thought, if I show myself at the window I can be seen by Hoeller, in that case why am I showing myself? I thought, after all I don’t have to show myself at the window, I can step back, I can step back so far that Hoeller can no longer see me, can’t possibly see me, and so I stepped back and I thought, now that I’ve stepped back Hoeller might turn the light on again in his workshop, because he’ll assume that I’m no longer interested in him now that I’ve stepped back from the window, he can feel free to turn on the light, as I’m no longer looking down there, I thought, he may well think, now I can turn on the light again here in the workshop, because he (me) is no longer looking down"

"In the morning I’ll sneak up on Roithamer’s legacy, I’ll just sort of sneak up on it first, then I’ll sift it and sort it." ( )

Germans may be considered to be more severe, but the works of the best-known Austrian authors available in English make the Austrians seem even less jolly. Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) at least does display a wicked sense of humour in much of his fiction, but he, Peter Handke (b.1942) and Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek (b.1946) show a lot of angry intensity, tempered only by some melancholy, especially in Hendke's later works. (The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction, by Michael Orthofer, Columbia University Press, 2016.)
Well, I can vouch for that. Despite his recent Nobel, I am not inclined to read Handke, but my experience with Jelinek is that once was enough. And now that I've read two by Thomas Bernhard, that might be enough of that angry intensity too.

(Though Joe from Rough Ghosts enjoyed Wittgenstein's Nephew so I remain open to trying that one too. After a bit of time to recover.)

I enjoyed Concrete. It amused me. But as Orthofer says, Bernhard is master of the extended rant, and 250-odd pages of extended rant in Correction is A Lot.

1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2006 Edition) tells me that...Correction is Bernhard's most sustained expression of his fascination with Wittgenstein. While I am open to howls of derision when I say so, I reckon he was playfully channelling Wittgenstein in the logic of his thought, 'atomising' facts and systematically taking them apart to their logical conclusion. Yes, I'm well aware that I'm reading a translation, but I'm thinking of recent discussions about the art of translation so I regard Sophie Wilkins' translation as a collaboration with Bernhard and therefore close to his intention.

(As I confess at Goodreads) while I make no claim to have understood it, I have actually read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. (All of it.) If (ignoring the layout) you follow the train of thought in T L-P, it's not unlike Bernhard's relentless logic.

1* The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
1.2 The world divides into facts.
1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Routledge Classics, 2001, first published in 1921)

(The layout of Correction, BTW is two long continuous paragraphs, separated into Parts 1 and 2.)

Bear with me...

The unnamed narrator tells us in Part I that he is the literary executor of Roithamer — who has some correspondences with the real-life Wittgenstein, except that Roithamer has committed suicide, and Wittgenstein did not. This narrator is obsessed with Roithamer and is angst-ridden about the possible posthumous publication of Roithamer's papers, especially his study of Altensam, which was his childhood home and a place that he loathed. (Along with the rest of Austria).

Roithamer finished this paper in a great burst of energy after his sister died, but soon afterward...

...destroyed it again by starting to make corrections in it and correcting it over and over again until in the end he destroyed it entirely by his incessant corrections, during his stay in Hoeller's garret after his sister's death, he felt he had corrected it to death and so destroyed it, but as I know now, as I have ascertained in the shortest possible time of my stay here in Hoeller's garret, he did not really destroy it by his utterly ruthless, hence utterly perfect corrections, but turned it into an entirely new work, because the destruction of his work by his own hand, by his keen mind which dealt most ruthlessly with his work was, after all, merely synonymous with the creation of an entirely new piece of work, he had gone on correcting his work until his work was not, as he thought, destroyed but rather a wholly new piece of work had been created. (p.55)

Got that? How many times did you have to read it to make sense of it? QED*, just like Wittgenstein... (only more loquacious.)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2022/03/02/correction-by-thomas-bernhard-translated-by-... ( )

This was Bernhard's fourth novel, written in a period when he had started to become seriously involved in the theatre and appearing at around the same time as the first part of his autobiography, Die Ursache. Unusually for Bernhard, it contains a paragraph break, which comes a little beyond the halfway point, on page 194.

At the centre of the book is the narrator's close friend Roithamer, a Wittgenstein-like figure who has cut off most of his contacts with his landowning family and their seat, Altensam, to go off and do scientific research in Cambridge. The only member of his family he cares for is his sister, and he has been busy with a project to build her an architecturally innovative cone-shaped house in the middle of a forest. However, she has died before the completion of this ambitious project, and Roithamer has taken his own life.

The narrator comes to stay in the attic room in the home of their mutual friend Höller, a taxidermist, which Roithamer has been using as his Austrian base, in order to sort out the papers he has left behind. At the heart of these is a monograph On Altensam, and everything connected to it, with special reference to the Cone. Roithamer has corrected his draft of this book to create a second draft, then corrected it again, each time apparently unsatisfied that what he has written is true.

The opening paragraph of the novel is a monologue by the narrator, describing his feelings about Roithamer, his death, and his intellectual legacy; about being in Höller's house and seeing him going about his normal trade with his normal family; about the childhood the three of them shared, and so on. At the end of this, in a mad moment at the end of a long sleepless night, he tips out all of Roithamer's writings onto the bed, messing up their sequence.

In the second paragraph, he shares with us his reading of Roithamer's writings, coming at us as in arbitrary order as he picks the papers up, and the narrative voice gradually shifts to Roithamer's own (rather like the indirect narration in Kalkwerk).

Between them, the narrator and Roithamer rant against the evils of Austria, parents, landowners, bourgeois values, pollution, parents, hunting, guns, brothers, scenery, architects, doctors, Linz, parents, hypocrisy, theatre-goers, women, parents, Austria, parents, etc., discuss whether suicide is a logical necessity in the modern world or a romantic self-deception of Austrians, and give us some interesting information about statics and the properties of cones. It's impossible to sum up, but it's a good 360 pages of solid wall-to-wall Bernhard prose, so who cares what it's about? This is writing that you could probably enjoy without even being able to understand German, just for its rhythmic loops and twists: the sardonic humour and black condemnation of just about everything in our boring little lives is merely a bonus... ( )

While reading it, this impressed me less than Bernhard's other larger novels, but it seems to have stuck with me. ( )