#korrigering

Houses and Pines by Egon Schiele, 1915

The sound of woodworms permeates the rooms of Altensam, the Aurach echoes between the walls of the houses. There is a sense of finality to Bernhard’s writing. Corrections is a dense book, with passages like walls. Most of it consists of just one long paragraph, feeling somewhat like a slab of rock. Impenetrable, with the pace almost palpably weighing on the reader, urging you to get going. Austria is cold and damp, the Aurach river deafening. This is where our narrator has come to sort out the papers left behind by his dead friend Roithamer. He’s not new to this place; they both grew up around these areas of the country, and it’s where Roithamer fulfilled his obsessive plan of creating a building in the shape of a cone for his sister to live in. When we enter the picture, the cone is already finished, as is Roithamer, and the unnamed narrator is picking up the pieces of what is left behind. Suicide is very prevalent, if not ever-present, in Corrections, and it’s something nearly inevitable to many of the inhabitants of Bernhard’s Austria. There, everybody carries their own end with them from the very beginning, just like they all carry the woods and mountains around which they grew up, the War, and Austria itself. The people in Corrections belong to and often even directly correspond to places. A mother from Eferding becomes ”that Eferding woman”, a brother from Altensam is ”Altensam through and through”. Most of Bernhard’s austrians belong to their places of birth and their hometowns like they do their mother’s womb, but there are other, more unfortunate ones, who never manage to agree with the places that ought to be their own. They search for other spaces than those familiar and scorned by them, and might move away to England, or build a house in the middle of a mountain pass, or maybe build a house shaped like a cone.

Geschälte Stämme by Albert Renger-Patzsch, ca 1957

I’ve been catching myself wanting to talk to people about the cone a lot. It is at once serene and sinister, a monument to both love and loneliness. There it stands, in the middle of the woods, built so that it can’t be seen until it is right in front of you, constructed to completely invoke Roithamer’s sister and her character. She must be happy here, Roithamer feels, and the cone quickly turns from an interesting idea into something absolutely horrifying. It’s too intense, as if you’d venture too deep into yourself in there, and get stuck in your own mind inside the cone. He wants this cone to be an absolute reflection of his sister’s very essence, and stories about meeting your double are horror stories. The cone becomes an intrusion, too close and too complete, something that desecrates all limits of the private and individuality. This is very much the quality I love about Corrections; the uneasy, creeping, confined. I want more of it. It works so well with Bernhard’s woods and mountains, a type of nature that somehow destroys and corrupts those that lives in it’s midst, robbing them of anything close to purity and innocence. In Bernhard/Roithamer’s world, the place and the character must be tightly intertwined, and the place easily wins the upper hand. Roithamer’s cone is in many ways an attempt to reverse this connection and to tame the place, making it conform to the person. Of course, the question is if that is at all possible. If we’re not all inescapably tied to our places.

Thomas Bernhard by Barbara Klemm, 1981

Bernhard really excels at several things. His words, the atmosphere, the repetition and the precision are all unique, and he is a master at making things so exact that they turn completely unintelligible. Sometimes, though, I feel like he loses his focus, forgets what he’s doing, and gets stuck in a way that detracts from the pacing. It easily becomes a bit too much, a couple of steps too many through the woods where every tree eventually looks the same. When that happens I tire of Bernhard a little and long for when he’ll get back on even keel again, impatiently plodding through the pages. Those are also the parts that won’t really let me give Corrections a higher rating; no matter how much I loved many elements of this book and dreaded and longed for the cone I’d get interrupted by long parts where the author seems to have gotten lost. The narrator’s neurotic repetition and need of exactness eventually start feeling like the author’s, and so finally what seemed like the narrator’s flaws (which were fascinating when they were his) instead became those of Bernhard himself (which becomes decidedly less interesting, and a lot more frustrating). If I’d only rate Corrections on the first half of the book, it would’ve been close to five stars. The other half turns away, becomes unfocused, and somehow gets stuck in its own disarray, just like Frost did earlier. (The translator’s note in the end of my Swedish edition sheds some light on some of the book’s problems: it explains that the original seemed to have been hurried by Bernhard, and written while focusing on some of his other books. How cohesive Corrections appears to the reader is very dependent upon the choices of the translators and publishing houses; the one that I’ve read has made the choice to leave what translator Jan Erik Bornlid says are sentences that lose their initial reasoning, as well as sentences that completely contradict themselves or earlier ones. It does however follow the original publisher’s suggestion to correct sentences that were left unfinished by Bernhard.) But no matter how demanding Bernhard feels at times and how frustrated it makes me, I’ll keep reading more by him. I can’t tear away from his words, his places, the loneliness and the cold. It’s the claustrophobia that pulls me back, and the cone that looms among the trees.