In the first forty-five
pages of his novel Correction, Thomas
Bernhard’s unnamed narrator makes some seventeen allusions, that is, direct or
indirect references to people, places, events, or other works of art outside the
text itself, a working familiarity with any of which would inevitably enrich
one’s reading of the story. If literature is fundamentally about connecting us
to others, and in this way connecting us more deeply to ourselves, then allusions
are an instrumental part of this phenomenon, as they not only increase the
breadth and depth of the particular characters within a given tale, helping to flesh
them out, to make them sympathetic—real—to
us, but they also have the nearly magical ability to expand the scope and
implications of the novel itself (its themes, its language, its situation) by
linking it (and us) to others in space and time in a rich, unstructured communitas of fellow human beings, each
struggling to make sense of our fraught and otherwise remote and lonely lives.
Well-chosen allusions give a story roots and dimension, binding us together in a
rich narrative world of knowledge, purpose, and meaning.
On page 45 alone, the
narrator refers to the baroque composers Purcell and Handel, to the thinkers Montaigne,
Novalis, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bloch, and Wittgenstein, and finally to the
modernist composers Hauer, Schönberg, and Webern. It is then, to the latter
composer, that the narrator alludes more specifically, recalling
the fact that his recently deceased friend, a scientist
and genius named Roithamer (in whose study he is now living as he pieces
together the puzzle of his breakdown and death), was immensely fond of the work
of Anton Webern, particularly the opening of his string quartets, Webern’s intensely
expressive “Slow Movement” or Langsamer
Satz.
As you read this dense and
demanding novel stop here in the story to listen to at least the opening bars,
as played, interpreted, by the brilliant Quartetto
Italiano:
Webern String Quartets. Each time I hear it I like to think that Bernhard
himself is listening, too.
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