Bernhard, an Austrian like Handke, is nearly 50 years old and for some time has been recognized in the German-speaking world as an extraordinary, if hard to classify, new fictional voice. Three of his novels have been published in the United States (several of his plays are in the process of being translated) and they have been almost totally ignored. The newest of his novels to be published here, his most important work up to the time of its appearance in Germany (1974), came out months ago with not even a mention in The New York Times Book Review or The New York Review of Books and, with the exception of an admiring and intelligent piece by Betty Falkenburg [see excerpt above] in the current Partisan Review, only scattered notices in a few small literary journals. This is in spite of the fact that this book, Correction (Korrektur), is astonishingly original, a composition of strange new beauty. Or, more likely, it's because of that.

Bernhard is difficult, to be sure, presenting the same kind of resistance to easy understanding that Beckett once did (and for many audiences continues to do) or as Handke does now. Allowing for wide technical and thematic differences, they are the writers whom he seems to me most to resemble, a more remote connection being to his Austrian predecessor, Robert Musil, and, still more distantly, the German Hermann Broch.

It is the acute sense these writers have of language as being radically untrustworthy, of one's having to outwit the words one uses at the same time that words remain the substance of wit and everything else, that distinguishes their work from our own more accepting, more straightforward literary practices. (p. 85)

There is one other element that has to be taken into account in any consideration of Handke and Bernhard, and that is the enormous influence on them of their fellow Austrian, Ludwig Wittgenstein…. In Bernhard's case, the influence is simultaneously both more direct and less so; that is to say, he has a strong temperamental affinity with the great philosopher and has absorbed much from him intellectually, but his work is less a transposition of Wittgenstein into literary and esthetic modes, as some of Handke's tends to be, than it is a sort of parallel utterance running alongside the master's.

Should one not have known of the complex relationship between Bernhard and Wittgenstein, it would be established immediately by Correction, whose protagonist is in fact modeled in detail after the philosopher. All the basic facts of the latter's life are here, placed later in time (Wittgenstein's dates are 1889–1951), while the book is set roughly in the present). Roithamer, the central character, who has committed suicide just before the narrative begins, is a brilliant Austrian scientist—his work is in genetic mutations—who has spent much time studying and teaching in England, as Wittgenstein did. Like the latter, Roithamer inherited a large fortune which he quickly gave away; like him, he has designed and built for his sister a strange, austere house and, like him, too, his family has a history of suicide.

At one point, Bernhard tactically separates the two—"he thought he recognized himself in them, the writings of Wittgenstein, a native of the same region as Roithamer and always a keen observer of Roithamer's regional landscape." But the identity is beyond question. Besides the physical facts there are the psychic and temperamental ones: Roithamer has Wittgenstein's pessimism about human life, his intolerance for stupidity and lies, his neurasthenia and, as Norman Malcolm tells us about Wittgenstein in his memoir of the philosopher, his tendency to be "tortured" and "exhausted" by abstract thinking.

But, despite all this, Correction is no more a fictionalized biography of Wittgenstein than Mann's Dr. Faustus is of Richard Strauss, whose life it borrows. As Mann's novel is "about" the life of art and imagination, Bernhard's is about the life of thought. Or rather, it's a literary construction whose elements are the violence mental processes do to us, the unreality they bring about; it's a tale in which thinking is the tragic mode of being. The Wittgenstein figure, through whom Bernhard organizes his own experience and perceptions, has reached the limit of intellectual possibility, the way in an older literary mode the tragic hero reaches a moral limit. (pp. 85-6)

The structure of Correction is simple and austere. The book is divided into two parts: the first, called "Hoeller's Garret," and the second, "Sifting and Sorting." There are no other divisions of any kind, no chapters, no paragraphs….

The novel's first section consists mainly in the narrator's memories of Roithamer and knowledge of his circumstances, filled out by the journals and notebooks. The second section begins in the same manner, but gradually the narrator's voice gives way to Roithamer's, speaking through the papers….

By this shift the narrator moves us more and more into the character's (Roithamer's) mind. But the narrator is also a character, of course, and the device serves to remind us of the literary action going on: Roithamer's mind at work, the narrator's, Bernhard's—three voices fused into a single expressiveness. In the end we and the narrator are fully inside Roithamer's head, obsessed with his obsessions, feeling his pain, aware of his awarenesses, and we feel "ruined," annihilated by the remorselessness, the incontrovertibility of such thought, the way the narrator had feared….

Gradually, the reader begins to grasp what Bernhard is doing, what instigates all this loathing and terror and what they serve. Correction, one comes to see, is no local, particular tale, not someone's pathological story but a profound meditation, or, since that implies a lofty detached enterprise, rather a literary invention violently suffused with thought, whose subject (if I can begin to do justice to it) is this: the fact that we are inserted into a world we haven't made, and consequent on that, the great gulf between what we are and what we are made to be, the effort we make to think our way through the discrepancy, together with the desperate inadequacy of the means we have—language. (p. 86)

Correction is something exceedingly rare among novels of recent years: a paradigm of consciousness and not simply a product. That it's a consciousness of despair and hopelessness doesn't mean the book induces them in us. Bernhard has said that "the art we need is the art of bearing the unbearable," and his novel joins that small group of literary works which nobly help us to do that. (p. 88)