Wait until next year

“Wherever we look, we see nothing but abandoned intentions”

Thomas Bernhard’s Correction (translated by Sophie Wilkins) is a book of two halves. In the first half the narrator is summoned to his friend Hoeller’s house following the death of their friend Roithamer, and is tasked with making sense of the papers that Roithamer left in Hoeller’s garret. The second half sees the narrator relay Roithamer’s final work, which outlines Roithamer’s thinking behind building a gigantic cone in the forest, but that ultimately details both his philosophy of the world and his descent into some kind of madness.

“I’ve lived half my life not in nature but in my books as a nature-substitute, and the one half was made possible only by the other half”

The two halves of the book mirror the doubling/halving seen throughout, the contrasts between books and nature, city and countryside, work and home. There need to be two sides to provide the right balance in life, a contrast that provides a creative tension that can help drive us, but also tear us apart. It is life as an act of perpetual correcting/correction, Bernhard in this book and others illustrating the urge to go from one direction to the exact opposite only to circle back again – whether in action or in word.

“What we publish is destroyed in the instant of publication. When we say what we are doing, it’s destroyed”

Bernhard’s trick in the second half of the book is to have the narrator indirectly relate Roithamer’s words, distancing us from them by placing the narrator between the reader and Roithamer. We are reading the narrator, who is reading Roithamer. It is a technique you can see Sebald picked up on with his works. 

This doubling of narrators both mirrors the themes of doubling in the book and is a device that shows the thoughts and madness of Roithamer (or anyone) will always be just out of reach. We are all ultimately unknowable as we are in a permanent state of correction, forever changing, and there is no way for anyone to articulate that inner life on the page and even if we could, the reader would interject or project themselves onto the text, and then wish to look away – “We read a book, we’re reading ourselves, so we loathe reading”.

“Every idea and every pursuit of an idea inside us is life…the lack of ideas is death”

This is a book on the importance of ideas, and the impossibility of those ideas, that to truly fulfill an idea requires the kind of purity and perfection of both thought and action to render it unachievable for most of us, and destructive for the few who can actually realize their vision. The idea might bring about life, but its completion will kill us. I can see why the narrators in many of Bernhard’s later books procrastinate and fail to do anything. Roithamer is an example of what happens when you throw yourself entirely into an idea at the expense of everything else.

“In this way people tend to waver at a certain point in their lives, and always at the particular crucial point in their lives when they must decide whether to tackle the monstrousness of their life or let themselves be destroyed by it before they have tackled it”

I suppose in some ways a creative act is also an act of correction. In creating something new it is, by definition, in opposition to what went before it. There may be a set of influences or processes or standards, but the creation corrects all of those, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in monumental ones. And this how we fight that monstrousness of life, and maybe that is a quietly and perversely hopeful thing. We may ultimately be destroyed by our ideas, but it is our ideas that give us life.