The Voice Imitator: 104 Stories by Thomas Bernhard
[one love affair]
[thirteen instances of lunacy]
[twenty surprises]
[four disappearances]
[twenty-six murders]
[two instances of libel]
[six painful deaths]
[three character attacks]
[five early deaths]
[one memory lapse]
[four cover-ups]
[eight suicides]
If you have never read the
fiction of Thomas Bernhard, The Voice
Imitator may be the perfect place for you to start. Comprised of 104
roughly paragraph-length stories that resonate with the dark profundity of
parables, the collection captures—writ small—the very eye and obsessions of
this grave and exacting writer (see George Ovitt’s earlier post: Climbing Mount Mordant). Best known for his novels, Correction and Extinction,
each an ardent defense of the life of the mind, each a dazzling screed against the
perennial scourges of bigotry, dogmatism, hypocrisy, and greed, as Bernard found
them flourishing in his native Austria, a country out of which, in his fiction
and plays, he fashioned a veritable gospel of loathing. In these novels (in
which he is all but indistinguishable from his narrators) he is no Tartuffe, but
raves like a prophet of old.
And what he says will
shake you. Of photography—that sacred
cow of our age—the narrator of his ultimate novel, Extinction, declares brilliantly, outrageously:
Photography is a vulgar addiction that is gradually taking
hold of the whole of humanity, which is not only enamored of such distortion
and perversion but completely sold on them, and will in due course, given the
proliferation of photography, take the distorted and perverted world of the
photograph to be the only real one. Practitioners of photography are guilty of
one of the worst crimes it is possible to commit—of turning nature into a
grotesque. The people in their photographs are nothing but pathetic dolls,
disfigured beyond recognition, staring in alarm into the pitiless lens,
brainless and repellent. Photography is a base passion that has taken hold of
every continent and every section of the population, a sickness that afflicts
the whole of humanity and is no longer curable. The inventor of the photographic
art was the inventor of the most inhumane of all arts. To him we owe the
ultimate distortion of nature and the human beings who form part of it, the
reduction of human beings to perverse caricatures—his and theirs. I have yet to
see a photograph that shows a normal person, a true and genuine person, just as
I have yet to see one that gives a true and genuine representation of nature. Photography
is the greatest disaster of the twentieth century.*
His novels are like a
purgative, like a ritual cleansing of the intellect and soul. Dark, relentless,
seemingly unforgiving as reflections on the human race, his vision is ultimately
anything but cynical, anything but unctuous or pedantic, shot through as it is with
a mordant, bitter-black wit that not only saves the reader from drowning but
sets him firmly on his feet again, then hands him a flower to sniff! It is
almost a reflex for me now that, whenever I’m feeling depressed, whenever I
feel I’ve lost my way in the world again, I read a few pages of Bernhard and
grin.
Reading The Voice Imitator is not nearly as
demanding as reading his novels, yet still bears the unmistakable stamp of his
intelligence and eye. Wry, quirky, provocatively understated, the simple stories
set one’s eyes askew. Here—a favorite of mine—is the first from the collection:
Near Oslo we met a man of about sixty who told us more
about the old people’s home than we already knew from reading Hamsun’s accounts
of the last year of his life, because he had been working in the home at
precisely the time during which the
greatest of Norwegian writers was living there. The man’s taciturnity had
attracted our attention in the inn near Oslo—usually so noisy on a Friday
evening—where we were staying for several nights. After we had sat down at his
table and introduced ourselves, we learned that the man had originally been a
philosophy student and had, among other things, spent four years studying at
Göttingen. We had taken him for Norwegian ship’s captain and had come to his
table to hear some more about seafaring, not about philosophy, from which,
indeed, we had fled north from Central Europe. But the man didn’t bother us
with philosophy and said he had actually given up philosophy overnight and put
himself at the disposal of geriatrics at the age of twenty-seven. He said he
did not regret his decision. He told us his first task had been to help an old
man get out of bed, make the bed for him, and then put him back into it. The old
man was Hamsun. He had looked after Hamsun every day for several months, had
taken him out into the garden that lay behind the old people’s home, and had
gone to the village for him to buy the pencils that Hamsun used to write his
last book. He was, he said, the first person to see Hamsun dead. In the nature of things, he said, he was not yet certain who
Hamsun was when he pulled the sheet up over his face.
Here, in much the same
tone, is another, this one called ‘Charity’:
An old lady who lived near us had gone too far in her
charity, She had, as she thought, taken in a poor Turk, who at the outset was grateful that he no longer had to
live in a hovel scheduled to be torn down but was now—through the charity of
the old lady—allowed to live in her town house surrounded by a large garden. He
had made himself useful to the old lady as a gardener and, as time went by, was
not only completely re-outfitted with clothes by her but was actually pampered
by her. One day the Turk appeared at the police station and reported that he
had murdered the old lady who had, out of charity, taken him into her house. Strangled, as the officers of the court
determined on the visit they immediately made to the scene of the crime. When
the Turk was asked by the officers of the court why he had murdered the old
lady by strangling her, he replied, out
of charity.
Now ‘The Milkmaid’:
Last week we witnessed the spectacle of five cows running,
one after the other, into the express train in which we had to return to Vienna
and of seeing them all cut to pieces. After the track had been cleared by the
train crew and even by the driver, who came along with a pick-ax, the train
proceeded after a delay of about forty minutes. Looking out of the window I
caught sight of the milkmaid as she ran screaming towards a farmyard in the
dusk.
Finally, to conclude this
post, a simple, haunting story called ‘Giant’:
In the cemetery in Elixhausen, some workmen who had been
hired to build a crypt for the late owner of a cheese factory excavated, at a
depth of about two feet, the skeleton of a man who must have been nine feet tall
and who had apparently been buried 150 years ago. As far back as anyone can
recall, only very short people are thought to have lived in Elixhausen.
* My
apology for having quoted a part of this passage in an earlier post. I simply couldn’t
resist.
Peter
Adam Nash
No comments:
Post a Comment