The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Voice Imitator by Thomas BernhardJeffrey DeShell
Thomas Bernhard. The Voice Imitator. Trans. Kenneth J. Northcott. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997. 104 pp. $17.95.
Thomas Bernhard’s book of extremely short fictions, all less than a page long and some shorter than this review, is not as satisfying as his longer works. Unlike Beckett—whose entire project seems dependent on a sort of distillation and stripping, a voiding and negating—or Kafka—whose concentrated parables and fragments are really similar gestures to his longer, unfinished novels—Bernhard does not seem completely at home in this genre.
In the constricted space of a few sentences or lines, Bernhard does not have the chance to develop adequately the musicality of his prose, a musicality built on repetition of key phrases—such as “so Roithamer” from Correction and “Glenn” and “Glenn Gould” from The Loser—and accents—all of the italicized words throughout the novels and his autobiography. This quality is hinted at in The Voice Imitator, with the repetition of the phrase “in the nature of things,” as well as many italicized words, but the book as a whole does not have the space or time to repeat, recombine, and vary the linguistic phrases and motifs. The book never quite attains the fluidity and momentum of the novels, and the language retreats from the resonant and material, almost concrete presence it enjoys in the longer works, to a sort of transparent or anecdotal reportage.
This collection is also only able to suggest some of the humor of Bernhard’s novels, and this is perhaps its greatest drawback. The Woodcutters, The Loser, even The Lime Works and Correction, are all brutally funny works. But again, this humor is built on repetition and recombination of linguistic motifs, a technique The Voice Imitator simply can’t have time for.
Still, this is Thomas Bernhard, and some of the writing is breathtakingly beautiful: he can pack an entire story or lifetime into a single italicized word, as he does with the word “character” in a story called “The Prince.” For my money, however, and despite the physical beauty of the book and the pristine quality of the prose, The Voice Imitator is a minor intermezzo compared to his other work. [Jeffrey DeShell]