Austrian Literature Archives - Mostly About Stories

How Much Use is A Writer’s Journal? Handke’s “Das Gewicht der Welt”

Earlier this year I read a strange but wonderful novella by the Austrian Nobel Laureate Peter Handke, Afternoon of a Writer. This work describes a few hours in the life of a writer, focusing on how the world comes to him as someone trying to perceive it creatively. We can see not just the beauty the writer finds within things, but also those moments when his perception begins to take an impression and work out how to integrate it into something more, adding meanings beyond what is directly apparent. It’s the most brilliant representation of how creativity might work (for some) that I have yet read.

Reading Handke is never exactly fun for me, but always rewarding. Turning to his journal of 1975-77, Das Gewicht der Welt (The Weight of the World), what I was interested in was the relationship between this text as a journal of impressions and the more directed, intentional work of Afternoon of a Writer. While Handke began Das Gewicht der Welt planning to integrate it into some kind of prose or dramatic work, he soon decided to broaden the scope of his notes to make it simply the “spontaneous noting-down of purpose-free perceptions”.

What we end up with, then, is simply impressions, recorded over two years in the life of a man. Things noticed and felt, raw materials following pre-processing rather than the refined product of The Afternoon of a Writer. The book declares in its dedication that it is for those “whom it concerns”. This is fair – it’s probably not for many. The majority of Handke’s observations are simply not particularly exciting. Inevitably so – one of its most memorable lines is “Never search for comparisons – one experiences them”. We readers, seeing them written rather than felt, suffer for the distance.

Handke wrote the things he wrote with a sense that they had some kind of value – he often notes his excitement to be finished with a conversation so he can write down some details, or his instinctual reaching for his notebook in the street. But unlike with an aphorism, this value may be only for him at this raw stage, and noticing the light is not the same thing as a practical insight on human behaviour which an aphorism often strives for.

As readers, we can attempt to be detectives, trying to see why he thought this particular thought was worth remembering. But this is far less rewarding than what we can get from Afternoon of a Writer, where we get not just an image but also its transformation into something luminous with meaning. Reading the journal is like trying to work on a cold case with no guarantee of success; reading the novella is more like reconstructing an event from a murderer’s confession and a bunch of scattered clues.

All those things we can get from Das Gewicht der Welt we can get as well, if not better, from Handke’s other prose. His perceptiveness regarding things like smells and sounds, his willingness to look at an action and relentlessly break it down into its components. If we can get those things elsewhere, the core value of the book might simply be the knowledge that Handke’s perceptiveness is the result of real work and real observations. A skill, trained and practiced. Not inspiration alone by any stretch.

Still, we must try to enjoy what we have too. A man on the street – “A man who sits sunken, tries repeatedly to set himself upright, to show his good posture, but each time sinks back into the same pose – finally, he is satisfied with it”. Another man reading a water bottle, “constantly slowly rotating it.” All of these are telling details but they tell us nothing except that Handke has noticed them – removed from a fictional setting, what do they do for us? There is no meaning behind the meaning, no thematic framework.

The value is simply the observing, not the things observed. But that makes the work hard to read even if enhancing our own watchfulness is our goal. We read a phrase like “sulphur-yellow late-afternoon light in the bedroom, and the feeling that one has already lain there a while a corpse,” and can do nothing with it except appreciate its aptness and try to see what the light looks like in our own rooms. Handke’s is not our perception to use, nor does what he see cohere as part of a whole in the context of this work or any other. For all those texts he wrote concurrently, such as The Left-Handed Woman, he kept separate notebooks. An overwhelming sense of a deliberate meaningless does not make for pleasurable reading.

I have written before of my intention to start keeping a writing journal of my own, and one of the successes of Das Gewicht der Welt is that it did give me a push to get started. A push and, to a certain extent, a model. The way Handke writes down things and says “a story could begin with this”, or how he gives hints about how he has come to his perceptions – “I decided not to buy a newspaper for the metro – that way I could experience more” – all of this was not wasted on me. Without such a desire to become an observer, however, it’s hard to see the book as anything but a slog.

I felt at times I could look behind observations and see the author, sat on a park bench too far away to hear a conversation but fixated upon the gestures of the conversant ones. Handke, as one of the most perceptive of writers, is absolutely a good person to learn observation from. The ruthless breaking-down of emotions (tiredness as an assault of the deja-vu was a favourite here), the breaking-down of actions, the observation of smell and sound and taste. In that sense, I have gained plenty from the work, even as I cannot easily commend it to others’ attention.

“The river water supremely textured, as if it were already frozen in place.”

“A Japanese family crossing the street. Husband, wife, and two daughters. All three women are exactly the same height, reaching only the man’s shoulders.”

“The sound of a hosepipe in the meadows like someone repeatedly ripping a piece of fabric”

We have shifted from Handke to me now, a few of my notes from a recent sojourn in the Alps. I do not want to suggest I have reached Handke’s level in my finished fiction, but as far as observations go, I don’t think these three random extracts from my little notebook are too far from his own in quality. That is probably another reason why I find it hard to recommend Das Gewicht der Welt. Noticing, ultimately, is probably not the hard part of writing. Flaubert told Maupassant to stare at a tree long enough to understand what separates it from all other trees, but how far does this actually matter?

Not so much, I think. (And indeed, when I read Maupassant recently I was not particularly impressed). Absolutely everything on the street is novel, never-quite-before-seen. Every person is unique. But fiction is not really about uniqueness itself, so much as competent coherence when dealing with something particular. Can we find a way of saying something new, whether that’s a new thematic network, or a new configuration of events designed to develop some reader’s emotional response? Can we say something new in a new way, or a more real way?

Paying absolute attention to what happens on the street is only really a path to a kind of meaningless realism, caked suffocatingly in details. I picked up Das Gewicht der Welt because I thought the “weight” of the title would be emotional, but I now think it really is just the weight of all Handke’s impressions upon him. The real difficulty with fiction, however, comes instead from caring enough about a thing or way of telling to use all those details effectively while discarding the rest. For Handke, that care is about perception itself. For another writer it might be something different, like God or love or money.

Reading another writer’s notebook like Das Gewicht der Welt is occasionally fascinating, and helpful as a guide to begin your own, but I’ve come to see it’s not really as much help as perhaps I had hoped. As with mining, where the primary value addition is never getting rocks out of the earth’s crust, but rather the process of milling, refining, and polishing, that turns raw materials into usable products, so too here the impressions are not nothing, but not where the real magic is either. For that magic, and for a far deeper sense of what a writer like Handke does, The Afternoon of a Writer is a much better thing to read.

The Writer’s Vision – Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer

Peter Handke’s Afternoon of a Writer (Nachmittag eines Schriftstellers) is my fourth work by the controversial Austrian Nobel laureate and the second which I have succeeded in squeezing a blog post out of, after his Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. I certainly don’t return to Handke because I enjoy reading him. Rather, I keep giving in to the aura of importance created by his prizes and his praises, in particular the curious assertion by native speakers, one I am unable to verify although I am reading in the original German, that Handke was one of a few writers who rescued the German language from the degradation that Nazism forced upon it. What I can say, and what was obvious at once with The Goalie’s Anxiety, is that Handke created what felt like a new way of writing about subjective experience, about consciousness, that was neither free indirect discourse nor the full interiority of the first person, stream-of-consciousness.

In The Goalie’s Anxiety Handke used this approach to question and probe the state of mind of a chance murderer as he increasingly lost touch with the world. In Afternoon of a Writer, by contrast, Handke represents the state of mind of a writer, who can stand in for perhaps any artist, as they go about their day. The morning’s work of creating is over, and now is time for the living. But living, for an artist, (all of this post must be silently caveated by saying this applies to some, not all creatives), is not the same as it is for the rest of us. For an artist, their subjectivity is changed, their living is charged and crackling with the absorption of material and impressions. Handke, particularly through his language, shows the full intensity of this subjectivity in his short novel as his writer goes for a walk.

It is on this language that I want to focus today, because language is the centre of this work, and observing its effects is the main source of excitement as we read. But there is also a space for judgement too. As we observe the writer and his consciousness it is impossible to avoid judging him, just as he judges his own self and relationship with the world. But to get to that judgement one must first make it through the language and what it does.

Plot

A writer finishes his writing for the day and goes for a walk. (Welcome to the world of Peter Handke.)

Clarity and Details

Perhaps it is best to begin with a paragraph, from when the writer enters his garden:

Despite the winter it still flowered, here and there, in his surroundings. It was precisely from their littleness and isolation that the campions, the daisies, the buttercups and the dead-nettles brought life to the carefully dug landscape. The buttercups, shining like enamel, for a moment even deceived him into believing he saw some sunshine. In the crown of an apple tree, eaten up by birds, there still hung a few fruits, their flesh likely frozen to glass. The last few leaves, heavy with hoar frost, fell, one after the other, almost vertically, with a crackle. The catkins were colourless, as if lamed by the cold. On the picket fence and next to the house door there was even a bluebell, frost blue.

Trotz des Winters blühte es noch hier und da in dem Umkreis. Gerade in ihrer Kleinheit und Vereinzelung belebten die Lichtnelken, die Gänseblümchen, die Hahnenfüße und die Taubnessellippen das starr gerippte Gelände. Die emailleglänzenden Hahnenfußkelche täuschten für Augenblicke sogar einen Sonneschein vor. In der Krone des einen Apfelbaums, von Vögeln angefressen, hingen noch einige Früchte, das Fleisch wohl glasig gefroren. Die letzten Blätter, beschwert vom Reif, stürzten eins dem andern zu Boden, fast senkrecht, mit einem Krachen. Die Haselkätzchen waren farblos, wie gekrümmt von der Kälte. Am Palisadenzaun und neben der Haustür stand je eine Glockenblume, frostblau.

Once, when I was at school, an English teacher I much admired made us do a test. We had to identify, from pictures, about twenty different common plants in our surroundings – I mean things like oaks, elms, birches. I think the high score was about seven. Today I would be no better, but I have always found it funny that I can name more plants or birds or fish in German or Russian than I could ever identify with my own eyes. The knowledge of the natural world that is needed to give specificity to our impressions is increasingly absent among us, but not with Handke’s writer, who pins down each of the flowers’ names. There’s also a richness to them that the English cannot quite convey, though my own attempt could be improved. Daisies are literally “little geese flowers”, buttercups are “hen feet”, nettles echo the word “Taube”, for a dove, while catkins at least manage to carry over the association to English. In short, the flowers are not static, but by Handke’s choice, perhaps, are each associated with living animals, giving them still further liveliness. We can almost see the writer (and his author) noticing this and smiling to himself.

The leaves falling – how clear this is, how precise, how mechanically, the writer notices them! First – that there are not many leaves left, then, the hoarfrost, then the order of falling, then the way they fall, and finally the sound. In short, he captures the whole thing, a series of impressions forming a whole. Then we end with a single word in German, “frostblau”. It sounds like a breath on a wintry afternoon with its open vowel ending. Its purpose again is to show the artistic vision focusing in. A bluebell’s colour is obvious, known, in its name. But the writer must be clearer than that, must note to himself exactly what the right word is – and that is precisely why that word is there, the follow up that caps the impression. It confirms that he knows how to look.

We can notice another characteristic element of Handke’s style – the relative absence of images that are not the things present. In a story, a writer has to decide whether to see what is there, or what is not. And here Handke has the writer seeing what is before him, yet with just a hint of looking beyond. The glassy apples are an example – it’s like the beginning of an image, the first thought before its elaboration. The German is also softer than my rendering. “Frozen glassily” is softer than “frozen to glass” or even “like glass” because it keeps the wordcount low and lets us pass by, barely registering it. Instead, we notice the image, the apple itself. It’s about prioritisation, framing.

This is a section of Afternoon of a Writer from before the man begins his walk. It hangs on the page, surrounded by white space. It is a noticing, a thing of beauty to me, a word person. It is not merely the background to some other impression or emotion, or that concealed boast of botanical erudition that I remember feeling while reading someone like A.S. Byatt – here, this noticing is all there is. What is normally the background has become the foreground, even if one day, perhaps in the writer’s work, it will need to move back into the background once again. We are simply made to see.

Imagine

The novel is so rich with details, with noticings, that it is almost a shame to move on. Besides noticing, besides detail after detail, about light, about eyes, about landscape, we also see another aspect of the artistic vision, when the man imagines, rather than merely seeing. The autobahn suddenly causes him to feel, for a moment, “a vibration in his arms, as if he were sitting with the driver in the cabin” of a truck. He then sees a stationary train, and seems, instantaneously, to create characters from afar. He imagines how “a child’s hand searched for the hand of an adult.” He sees the waiter, the dishwasher, each with their actions and their distinct being. And all of this from just a “Fernbild[]” – a distant image.

We learn very little about the writer’s work in Afternoon of a Writer, but one of the few things we learn is that it is set in the summer. At another moment, looking at some birds, his mind shifts from the detail into the imagination, and then into the work. We observe this process again, directly, in the text:

“Motionlessly sat the tiny birds up in the branches, just like the crows in the crown of the next tree along, and the even the gulls, otherwise so unruly, sat motionless upon the railings of the bridge. It was as if snow were falling upon them all, even though there were no flakes in sight. And just here, at this living image with the rain of wings, hardly noticeable, the gaps of the beaks as they opened, with the eyes like little dots, there arose before the observer that summer landscape where the story played out which he was writing at that moment.”

The first sentence gives us the real, with the second we begin to see the artistic mind look beyond the real, and with the third we arrive at the destination – the image of the story, entirely different from what he is seeing. In this way we see the process of creation yet again.

To be a successfully writer, Handke might argue here, we play many different roles. Hence the use of that word “Beobachter” (observer) instead of the “Schriftsteller” (writer) of the novel’s title. At another point he is the “Beschatter”, or shadower. One thing that I have just noticed as I write this is these two examples contain the passive “be” prefix in German. Compared to the activity of writer, they suggest a much more receptive role. This is appropriate. If the novel begins with the man having finished his writing, for the rest of it he is primarily receiving, experiencing. At one point he grows anxious while reading the newspaper because he feels it is stopping him from thinking. Instead, he wants perhaps to be that transparent eyeball which Emerson described in his essay “Nature”. He takes things in and reflects while we watch.

Hence the use of questions in the novel. They are not the fake questions of a stream of consciousness, but the questions we can imagine the artist asking themselves as they reflect: “Wasn’t it curious that it was only during the hours of writing that his living space could lose its boundaries in this way?” It’s a note to self we are privileged to see, but nothing more. It may have a future use, but we will not be present to see it.

Judgement

The one role that the writer does not give himself directly in the text is “mad”, but it is not so far away from his experience for him to be entirely safe from it. For just as the writer experiences the world with the aim of gathering material, of making it “beschreiblich” (describable), we can also see him facing other consequences of that particular tuning. Early on, and in a beautiful (in the original) phrase about his hopes for his writing, he thinks “the shadows of a bird twitching over the wall should, instead of distracting him, accompany the text and make it transparent.” The word “accompany” is the one to focus on. For we soon notice that the writer has no family except a cat, and no real social life to speak of. He believes, indeed, that he cannot truly connect with others anymore. Stopping in a pub, the people he meets are reduced to their artistic use – “turns of phrase, exclamations, gestures and cadences.”

In short, we could say he has made himself stunted, stranded. He can create, we must assume, and he can absorb from the world far more than most of us can. Yet for all that richness, what poverty! To gain every shade of green he has eliminated all red from his world. He refuses to go onto his own balcony except to do the washing because the impression of the view is too overwhelming. When he goes for a walk he feels no “joy” until he has placed his movements within a plan. Handke is not a writer for judgements, but it is probably telling that the novel ends with the word “Schauder” – awe. “He wondered at himself, near to a long-forgotten awe.” Such a word redeems him, even if it does not do so to us. Just as with earlier use of the word “entrücken” (translate), in the biblical sense of going from earth or hell to heaven, we have a sense that we ought not judge him. His life is different, higher, even if it seems strange to us. He, himself, appears happy – he is at work.

Certainly, I can sit here in judgement, but I am jealous really. I mentioned a few posts ago that I wanted to start carrying around a notebook precisely for such noticings – I need to learn to experience the world around me in the way the writer does here. While I may not wish for myself the isolation this writer has, (at least on a full time basis), there’s no denying that this novel portrays a way of life that is far closer to what is necessary for the kind of art I might want to make than the way of life I currently lead. And what is hardest to avoid is the sheer clarity of Handke’s work as it describes that way of life. We spend the novel standing next to the writer as he perceives. We observe his observations. We see exactly what he sees, how he processes his material and reflects upon it, even the questions he asks. In short, and probably far better than any guidebook, Afternoon of a Writer is a guide to precisely that – being a writer, being in the world and finding in it what you need to create.

I would like to be more critical, but I can’t. I don’t enjoy reading Handke. Yet each time I return I learn something I seriously think no other writer would be able to teach me. Some of it can only be done in German, of course. His use of separable verbs (especially the word “fort” for a continuing indicated only at the end of the sentence) to freeze an image for an extended moment of observation, or his long adjectival phrases which maintain the connection between a thing and its surroundings thanks to forgoing commas in a way that is difficult in English, for example. But the rest – the details, the details, all of the wonderful details – we can take away, whoever we are, whatever language we write in. I don’t want to read more, but I know I must. He surely is one of the greats.

Correcting our Idea of Genius – Thomas Bernhard’s Correction

I am something of a Thomas Bernhard fanatic. After Woodcutters, the other Bernhard on this blog, I had a break until late 2023, when I read, in quick succession, Concrete, The Loser, Extinction, and Wittgenstein’s Nephew. Bernhard is a writer who is addictive in a quite unique way. His books are propelled by the bile and bitterness of his narrators and are inescapable thanks to their flowing, paragraphless prose, which offers no exit for someone looking to put them down and take a break. Entering Bernhard’s world means a total surrender to his aims and approach.

Correction, which I have now read for the second time, is to my mind the best Bernhard, and one of my favourite books altogether. It has a unique structure for the author, with two narrators, (even though one filters the other,) who take equal sides of the novel for themselves and who have slightly different voices. It also has the most interesting readerly experience, in that the novel’s journey is primarily one where we change our opinion about its central character, the genius scientist Roithamer, rather than one where something happens. All happening takes place before the book begins.

As with all Bernhard, the story itself is simple. Roithamer, a genius of sorts who works at Cambridge, upon the death of his parents inherits a lot of money and decides to use this money to build a Cone in the centre of the Kobernausser Forest in Austria for his sister to live in. Once the Cone is finished his sister dies, probably not of joy, and Roithamer then hangs himself. Our narrator, a friend of Roithamer’s, arrives at the house of a mutual friend, Hoeller, where Roithamer did much of his work on the Cone, to start putting Roithamer’s literary remains in order. The first part of Correction is an almost hagiographic portrayal of Roithamer by this friend; the second is Roithamer’s own literary remains, partly filtered. Chief among them is a manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone”.

In the first part of the book Roithamer is presented as a classical genius – what Bertrand Russell said of Wittgenstein is entirely appropriate here: “he was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” Roithamer is totally focused in a way that few of us ever are: “a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end”. The ultimate end, it turns out, is suicide, but before we get to suicide, this thinking is inspirational. Roithamer builds a Cone for habitation, something nobody has done before, and does so totally professionally, as the result of massive research and effort, and all this in the face of all manner of criticisms and accusations of madness.

He is also totally himself, totally dedicated. Quite frankly, I would rather be like this – more pedantic, more unbearable, more focused, than any of the human qualities those who know me would wish I had in greater quantities to balance out my already well-developed inhuman ones. Almost all I could think as I read these sections was how much I agreed with everything, how much I myself wanted to build my own Cone, or rather in my case a Cube, a white glass cube but also in the centre of a forest or failing that atop a cliff and far away from everything and everybody, my own “thought-chamber” where I would be able to work totally undisturbed and think better, cleaner, wiser thoughts than anywhere else. A place where I would experience the same joy as I had recently in the crypt at the cathedral in Münster, where I was alone beside silent stone.

We see Roithamer’s genius reflected in Bernhard’s prose. It flows, in long sentences, with a focus on choosing the right words. One of the things I love, you’ll have noticed, is Bernhard’s italics. He uses italics to make us read words and phrases we might otherwise pass over. Strangely, simple though it is, it works. But there are also the neologisms, obviously more brilliant in the original German where they can remain a single word, things like the “thought-chamber” above. This sentence-by-sentence genius can also be drawn out to the wider book, where we are constantly becoming more precise, more accurate, more truthful in our various assertions.

Here is an example. On page 1 we learn that Roithamer has killed himself. On page 53 we learn the location, on page 61 we learn the method, on page 81 we learn who found him. The whole book is structured like a spiral, as we constantly correct our initial view to be closer to the reality that once was. Spirals can mean madness, of course, the sense of one being trapped. But they can also be like drill bits, precisely what is needed to make a hole through something – some challenge or problem – otherwise impenetrable. That is the great test of genius and obsession – to fixate upon the right thing, not the wrong. I have a friend whose longtime obsession is Pokémon Pearl. I, fortunately, am more obsessed by books and terrible questions.

Our narrator’s obsession is Roithamer himself. This is, he notes, not exactly healthy. He describes being unable to think his own thoughts, because he is incarcerated “within Roithamer’s thought-prison – or Roithamer’s thought-dungeon.” This, naturally, makes the depiction of Roithamer we receive in the first part of the book slightly suspect. It also provides one of the novel’s mysteries. For the second part is a collection of Roithamer’s thoughts, as filtered through the narrator, yet the narrator is nowhere to be found. Even though he claims they were friends who went to school together, Roithamer doesn’t mention him once. In fact, Roithamer provides information that directly contradicts the narrator’s testimony. (The narrator claims Roithamer visited Stocket to see him, whereas Roithamer claims he visited Stocket to see an uncle).

The result of the narrator’s obsession is that he essentially goes mad, helped by working in quite literally the same room as Roithamer when he worked on the Cone. He is almost subsumed into Roithamer. Arguably, the second part of the book, where Roithamer’s voice is even more dominant, is just an extension of this – the narrator is totally crushed as a human being with any more existence than merely that of a bridge between the dead man’s words and our ears. Yet interestingly, his admiration for Roithamer, his Roithamer-obsession, is quite similar to what I felt.

One of the ways that Correction provides a journey for the reader is that it takes that attitude and forces us to amend it. Once we hear Roithamer’s voice, unvarnished, the genius becomes rather more petty than godly. “That extraordinary talent for life” which the narrator so praises becomes in practice rather pathetic. Roithamer absolutely hated his upbringing on the estate of Altensam. He spends page after page criticising his brothers, his father, his mother in particular. He describes endless squabbles and confrontations in which he himself is the instigator. For example, it was enough for him to return home from abroad and find that a barn had been painted to send him off on a rampage.

Given that, like a lot of people on the spectrum or whatever, Roithamer has a real dislike of hypocrisy, the sheer amount that we find in him soon comes to undermine him. Nobody understands him, yes, but he claims to have been observing his sister for years and years to create the ultimate habitation for her in the form of a Cone. Yet the result of this observation is a home so comically unsuited that she dies pretty much immediately. The repetitions of these problems, Roithamer’s total lack of growth, and indeed the way that his entire personality seems to have come from his upbringing even though he claims to despise it, all makes him look rather ridiculous. He cries about people who “never once seek a single cause of their unhappiness in themselves,” but it is he who is the first person who should consider this.

Bernhard is a hugely funny writer, which I have failed to indicate here thus far, but humour is another way that our thought-image of Roithamer becomes covered in cracks. As Roithamer’s own suicide approaches, he reels off a whole host of family members who have committed suicide, in a way that is too over-the-top to be upsetting. “…They shoot themselves, like my uncle, or they hang themselves, like my other uncle, or they throw themselves in front of a train, like my third uncle. … And didn’t our cousin, the only son of our third uncle, kill himself too, after he got married to a doctor’s daughter from Kirchdorf on the Krems.” When we learn that one of these people literally threw themselves down the air shaft of a cheese factory our sympathy struggles to break through the snort of laughter at these words.

In fact, it is humour that keeps Roithamer alive. At one point he visits the cliff off from which one of his relatives threw himself and finds himself considering following suit, “but suddenly, when this idea was at its most compelling, this idea seemed ridiculous to me, and I took myself out of there.” We laugh, perhaps, but three of Wittgenstein’s own brothers died to suicide, so these numbers are not the mad inflations they might seem. And Austria did, for a long time, have among the highest suicide rates in the world.

By the time Roithamer reaches the idea of suicide, the final “correction” for “our entire existence as a bottomless falsification and misrepresentation of our true nature”, we are already no longer with him, but watching him, rather sadly, as the madman that others did claim he was. One of the key elements of cone-building, as we learn, is “statics”, basically how to keep things from falling over. In the case of Roithamer, this provides a beautiful metaphor. He tips and tips as far as he can into his thoughts, and done well he can make huge advances (as he does by building the Cone) without getting to a point where he loses his balance and falls over. But in the book, he does go too far, and hence falls. We, watching, do not.

Another key idea, understandably, is the idea of correction itself. Roithamer writes his manuscript about his childhood and then corrects it, making it much smaller and completely different, then does so again, then finally kills himself. Correction, when I reflected on it, really has two meanings or uses. It can mean to take something false and replace it with what is true, as in the case of an incorrect mathematical summation, or it can mean to take what is largely true and make it more precise. Correction abounds in the latter, but believes it is a tale of the former. One of the mesmerising beauties of Bernhard’s prose is its precision-fanaticism. Whether it’s denying one word in favour of another, “master builder” instead of “architect”, or its deployment of a huge number of words and phrases to create a more accurate picture than one or two alone could do, Correction aims at precision in a way that others might be willing to stop and say this is “good enough.”

Precision-fanaticism is another phrase for perfectionism. Nowadays, self-help gurus are all about the need to be less of a perfectionist, and Correction provides a dramatization of why we should heed them. Roithamer, finding error and inaccuracy everywhere, ultimately gives up on his connection to the source of all error – existence itself. For us, it need not be so. We can stop at a given sentence, just as I can give up on a given blog post, and say that this is good enough. Could be better, but won’t be. Thus we live to fight another day.

As much as this book ultimately becomes a criticism of Roithamer, indeed even a correction to our idea of genius, it remains mysterious to me because I am unable to shake my love of the ideas it represents and the way it represents them. Much as once upon a time I wanted to be Ivan Karamazov or Levin, I would want to be Roithamer if I could. At least the Roithamer that is represented in the novel’s first half. The Roithamer of the second, with his pettiness and pointless arguments with his family members, I fear I already am.

Where Bernhard is normally so negative and cruel that we normally come out of his books looking for things that might actually be affirmed in life, in Correction I actually heard something truly beautiful and admirable – the sheer, single-minded dedication to an arbitrarily chosen idea that we are willing to stake our entire soul upon. Yes, it’s mad, but I want to build my Cone. Better that than not wanting anything at all, and sinking into the grim mediocrity that Bernhard hates so much.