The Voice Imitators

On Thomas Bernhard and My Literary Education

A Neo-Bernhardian at work. Source.

“But often the Past does not disappoint us; often it assists us in our quest to become our highest selves. For in the Past there have been many men of genius; and, inasmuch as the man of genius has come nearer to being continually conscious of his relation to the Over-Soul, it follows that the genius is actually more ourselves than we are.”

—Chester Noyes Greenough, The Harvard Classics Vol. 51/Philosophy V. (Emerson), 1914

Back in 2017, when I first devoted myself to reading as many books as possible and logging each of these books on a spreadsheet, because what else is there to do when you’re twenty-two and fresh out of college and you feel like life is finally yours to live, I read Open City by Teju Cole. It’s the fifth book I logged on that spreadsheet, and I’ve logged 1,663 books (and counting) ever since, so it’s fair to say that Open City occupies an upstream, formative position in whatever my self-directed literary education has turned out to be.

I loved Open City, and still do. It was like nothing I’d ever read before. I admired the tightly controlled yet still somewhat rambling cadence of the text, as well as the multi-layered density of the narrative itself. In the way that Cole portrays the probing, roving mind of his protagonist, who flaneurs around the streets of New York musing about art and history and literature and theory and his own life and the web of connections between all these phenomena, I glimpsed reflections of my mind, or at least my mind as I hoped it would someday become. Open City did for me the thing that literature is meant to do: turn the strange familiar and the familiar strange. I saw the city where I’d grown up in a new light, and developed a deeper understanding of what novels could achieve. Though I might not have posed it to myself in these terms, I have no doubt that almost ten years ago some inward part of me began churning away, trying to figure out how I would one day create my own version of such a novel, how I too could pitch my voice the way that Cole had pitched his.

Later in 2017, I read Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, probably because something on the internet told me that if I liked Cole, then I’d love Sebald. At that point, I was ruined for life.

Here was an obvious antecedent to the voice that had thrilled me just months earlier, the same voice I’d found so original and wholly formed. There were differences between this voice and that one—reasons why Open City stands as a great novel on its own merit, and why Austerlitz and Sebald’s other work nonetheless surpass it¹—but the lineage was unmistakable. What I’d seen in a new light was cast in a newer light still, colder and starker than before. Now I understood that while Cole might have been offering his own unique interpretation of Sebald, and applying a Sebaldian lens to different settings and themes, he was in a sense doing Sebald, the way someone might do an impression of public figures that everyone on earth can sort of do an impression of². I understood, in a way that I had never previously understood, that out of an accumulation of such impressions, stacked atop each other and twisted into new shapes, art marches forever onward.

This is a fairly basic point, but a lot of fairly basic things feel like revelations when you’re twenty-two.

In 2018, probably because of some other if you like X then you’ll love Y thing I saw on the internet, I read Correction by Thomas Bernhard, the first of multiple Bernhard novels I’ve read ever since. In 2020, having already read The Trial and The Metamorphosis and other more famous work by Franz Kafka, I read The Castle and Amerika. In 2021 I read the collected short fiction of Robert Walser, as well as Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. In 2023 I read Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter. Earlier this year I read Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist. Throughout all that time I also read everything published by both Sebald and Cole, tracing the junctures where their voices intersected and diverged, and the processes by which each writer came to sound more like himself. On and on these voices echoed, shifting in tone and altering in volume yet never fading away. I learned, and am forever learning anew, that there’s always more of the chorus to discover.

While I now tend to view Open City as a gateway, I can’t help but dwell on what I’ve lost since reading it nearly a decade ago. These losses go beyond thinking less of Open City itself, which I do, even if I still think it’s a great novel. Compared to back then, I no longer find myself as excited while reading any book, even those that I love, because part of me is always wondering where this latest voice came from, or recognizing in its tenor echoes of other voices I’ve heard before. And when, as Open City did, a newly encountered book spurs me to think about my own writing, it’s no longer enough for me to consider how I might gear my voice toward a similar pitch. Now I have to ask myself what additional qualities I might bring to justify my work’s existence. Now I find myself wondering which aspects of my voice truly belong to me, and whether those aspects are enough to keep me from sounding too much like anyone else.

*

Last month, Naomi Kanakia published a mammoth survey of Thomas Bernhard’s life and work. It’s an extremely thoughtful, engaging piece of literary criticism, and not just due to the fact that Kanakia read everything Bernhard ever published—a heroic feat, given that while I’ve found value in each Bernhard novel I’ve read, I’ve also been glad, in a way that doesn’t apply to my favorite authors, to reach the end of each of these novels. Beyond the sheer volume of her effort, Kanakia offers multiple fascinating insights into the nature of Bernhard’s work, particularly a theme that’s long captured my interest: the mini-movement of contemporary authors who are, to varying degrees, doing Bernhard.

I touched on this demi-genre in two of my earliest Substack essays, where I first examined Bernhard’s appeal to potential imitators and offered my own stab at doing Bernhard, and then had AI write a Bernhard imitation with the same premise as mine, as an experiment to see whether adhering to a distinct framework can help make AI-writing less shitty³. Kanakia’s take on this rash of Bernhard imitators, whom she dubs the ‘Neo-Bernhardians,’ is more positive than my own:

“Oscar Dorr⁴, writing for House House, [states]: ‘...directly aping a great writer in hopes of piggybacking on their genius is simply ineffective, a waste of talent. It makes for a bad read.’

I thought a long time about whether I agree with this statement, and I have to say...I do not think so. I believe what the Neo-Bernhardians are doing is good and praiseworthy, and is no different from what Bernhard himself—or any great author throughout history—has done.”

Kanakia argues that whatever one thinks of the Neo-Bernhardians, they’ve discovered a distinct style of writing they’re passionate about, and built that style into a formalized demi-genre that’s evolving in interesting directions. This is more than many of current literary fiction’s most highly praised authors have done, and so these Neo-Bernhardians shouldn’t be dismissed just because they’re imitating a familiar voice. In the grand sweep of literary history, Kanakia claims, Neo-Bernhardianism will likely continue to incorporate new elements, gathering momentum until someone from the movement’s ranks manages to break through into the mainstream, in turn setting off a new movement, and surely counter-movements beyond that. On and on the voices go.

I don’t necessarily disagree with many of these premises, but as I stated in a comment on Kanakia’s article⁵, my own take on Neo-Bernhardianism is a bit harsher.

In my comment, I noted that as something of a Neo-Bernhardian myself⁶, I found writing like Bernhard easier than writing like myself, in my own voice. Part of the impetus behind this essay was to expand on what I mean by easier.

To me, easier carries two-fold weight. I mean not only that writing like Thomas Bernhard is easier than writing like yourself, whatever that entails, because writing like someone else is always easier than writing like yourself, given that applying a pre-existing literary framework narrows the number of decisions that you as a writer need to make, lending the story you’re trying to tell a shape that you don’t have to do the work of determining, but also that writing like Thomas Bernhard specifically is easier than writing like other writers, easier than choosing another narrative voice from amid literature’s panoply of narrative voices, not merely due to the distinct qualities of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, the flowing sentences and italicized repetitions that lend his prose, which is now your prose, the unmistakable rhythym that leads every last commentator on Thomas Bernhard, every last one without fail, to note the musical quality of Thomas Bernhard’s narrative voice, and to reference Thomas Bernhard’s musical training in his youth, but also due to the patina of serious literature that this narrative voice endows upon your work, a seriousness stemming in turn from the demands that such a structure ipso facto places upon a reader, the lack of paragraph breaks that cause the text to assume upon the page an imposing heft, transforming before the reader’s watering eyes into a sustained scream, a mountain rearing vertiginously toward the heavens, a great oozing magma of words signaling to the reader that you, the Neo-Bernhardian writer, are a serious writer of serious literature, all because you can do a pretty credible job of writing like a writer whom a lot of other writers are currently trying to write like.

Shit, my bad. See how easy it is to slip into all that?

As I noted in my comment on Kanakia’s article, it’s fun to write this way, clearly—more fun, I would wager, than it is to imitate other writers. That funness is linked to the fact that Bernhard isn’t the most difficult writer to imitate, and that he boasts a style conducive to rapid production, so you automatically feel accomplished as you sit back and watch your word count rise, but it goes beyond that. There’s something inherently satisfying, at least to me⁷, about aping Bernhard’s florid language, his reflexive scorn, his genuinely funny self-loathing. There’s a reason why we haven’t seen a new generation of writers imitating other writers with idiosyncratic prose styles, Nabokov or Woolf or McCarthy or whomever. Beyond Bernhard’s mood being more uniquely suited to our vitriolic, polemical times, those other writers are way harder to imitate⁸.

I come down more harshly on the Neo-Bernhardians in part because I can’t shake the feeling that they’re taking the easy way out. Beyond the reasons just mentioned, there’s an additional structural component to this feeling, which is ultimately a matter of prose-preference. Over the course of a Neo-Bernhardian novel, or even just a plain old Bernhard novel, I begin to miss the rigorous shaping of distinct paragraphs and tight sentences, a varied cadence that, at least to my inner ear, sits at the heart of so-called good writing⁹.

But beyond mere mechanics, the deeper problem is a matter of spirit.

Take Mark Haber. He’s the Director of Acquisitions and Marketing at Coffee House Press, a wonderful publishing house, and previously served the operations manager at Brazos Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Houston. This is a man who’s devoted his life to literature in a more profound and concerted way than I ever have, and I genuinely admire him. He has also, as the author of Reinhardt’s Garden, Saint Sebastian’s Abyss, and Lesser Ruins¹⁰, made it his mission as a writer to emulate Bernhard’s prose and thematic concerns across a range of settings and scenarios that, while not explicitly covered in Bernhard’s oeuvre, aren’t far removed. Haber’s novels constitute a series of obsessive narrators recursively examining the simultaneous absurdity and exaltedness of art, with their monologues revealing an inner mania fomented by unshakable quests for unreachable truths.

All of this strikes me as an excellent mission for a writer to pursue, and I’ve found value in all three Haber novels I’ve read, which makes it all the more baffling that he seems so content to pursue these themes via a path already trodden by another man. I can’t, as Kanakia does, simply claim that Haber has found his niche and leave it at that, and I don’t know if I’d go so far as Dorr and say that imitating Bernhard to this degree is a “waste of talent,” because Haber is clearly a talented writer, and I’d rather read him doing Bernhard than a lot of writers doing themselves. So I guess I come down somewhere in the middle, which is to say that the notion of a writer who’s content to let his voice—the means by which he announces himself to the world, the most individual and idiosyncratic tool in any writer’s arsenal—sound identical to someone else is just, I’m sorry, so fucking weird to me. I truly don’t get it.

If you’re breaking into standup comedy, isn’t there something inherently sad about aspiring to become a Rodney Dangerfield tribute act¹¹? Who gathers his friends to practice in his childhood garage with the intent of forming a cover band? Why isn’t Michael Haneke’s shot-for-shot Americanized remake of Funny Games considered a masterpiece on par with his original film? And if you’re an intelligent person who cares about literature and has thoughtful contributions to make to the canon, wouldn’t you want those contributions to stand a little more fully on their own?

Maybe that’s just the arbitrary standard I’m imposing based on what I seek to do in my own writing¹², or what I like to see as a reader. And Lord knows that while this might be my own personal Substack, my views do not dictate the ways of the world. Still, I do think there’s something self-defeating about such faithful imitation. It seems like an unbridgeable limitation, a fatal lack of artistic vision. Which brings me to Happiness and Love.

Released in 2025, Happiness and Love is Zoe Dubno’s take not only on the Bernhardian narrative voice, but a specific Bernhard novel, Woodcutters. Probably the ur-Bernhard novel, and my own favorite, Woodcutters relates the inner monologue of a miserable guest at an artistic dinner party in 1980s Vienna, conveying his abnegating thoughts as he shit-talks the hosts, the other guests, himself for going there in the first place, and the society that holds them all together. It’s a very funny novel, containing illuminating and even rather moving meditations on art and death, and the protagonist’s misanthropy is more relatable than I’d care to admit.

Dubno transposes all of these inputs onto contemporary New York, crafting a takedown of the new-school arts scene. Surely, I thought, this would be a bridge too far, a death-knell for the Neo-Bernhardians. To borrow the old master’s style is one thing, but to apply this style to the exact same plot as an extant novel, just with the details lightly scrambled, was almost flagrantly easy to dismiss. At least Haber concocts new(ish) landscapes in which his Bernhardian prose can be set loose¹³. But this, this so-called Happiness and Love, was little more than a stunt, a paint-by-numbers exercise. I don’t even care about Bernhard like that, despite all that I’ve written about him, and even I was offended. How dare Dubno? I mean really, how lazy can you be?

Then I actually read the book.

*

I’ll cut to the chase: I liked Happiness and Love more than I thought I would. Not because of the ways in which the novel adhered to Bernhard, but for the ways in which it tried to break free from those strictures. I wish it had done more of that. I wish it had been more able to do that. And therein, I think, lies Neo-Bernhardianism’s ultimate shortcoming.

Essentially, the aspects of Happiness and Love that I most enjoyed were elements that Bernhard was generally less concerned with in his work: psychological insight, pathos, and the specific details—the texture of a world—that lend any novel, even those from the avant-garde, a certain degree of realism. In other words, the typical Bernhardian structure had been run through an MFA fiction filter¹⁴, bringing it closer to the patterns and concerns of a traditional novel.

Your mileage may vary in terms of whether this is a good thing; I probably wouldn’t have expected too much if you’d told me this was what Dubno had set out to do. Yet it yields positive results. There’s a genuine sadness and depth to the character of Rebecca, the dead actress at the periphery of the crew populating the Downtown Manhattan artistic dinner party, and the center of the narrator’s circling thoughts. Rebecca helps pull the narrator outside herself, grounding the work with what feels, at least at times, like real people—no small thing in a Bernhard-inflected novel, where most figures, narrators included, are constructs by design.

I also thought that the novel succeeded in replicating certain strengths of traditional Bernhardian narratives. For example, Happiness and Love offered incisive commentary on the artifice and careerism of so-called creative lives, and how far these lives remain from true substance, from anything that could be said to resemble meaningful art. If at times the figures at the artistic dinner party feel like caricatures, or the narrator’s mental jeremiads against such self-evidently loathsome people seem like shooting fish in a barrel, well, Bernhard wasn’t exactly known for subtlety or restraint, either. Many times throughout Happiness and Love, when I felt like things were dragging or running a little over-the-top, I asked myself whether these conclusions were all that different from what I often feel while reading the old master himself, and I couldn’t really come up with a clear answer.

Where Happiness and Love slips, at least for me, is in the tension that emerges between the more traditional novelistic elements that Dubno seems determined to introduce and the formal constraints she’s imposed upon herself. While this tension might lead, in other hands, toward interesting (or potentially unsuccessful) metafictional directions, in this case it mostly results in somewhat uneven prose. On a sentence-to-sentence level, Dubno doesn’t adhere to strict Bernhardianism; while her writing remains clear, it’s often far more clipped than Bernhard’s baroque elaborations, with transitions between past and present that seem, in their abruptness, to be calling out for the paragraph breaks that Dubno willfully refuses. And when, compared to Woodcutters, Dubno engineers a larger role for the actress in whose honor the artistic dinner party is being thrown, the resulting monologues between the actress and her interlocutors feel a bit clunky, both in the way they’re transcribed within the text’s rigidly Berhardian style, and in the deux ex machina-like purpose they serve in the narrative at large.

In the end, I didn’t think the voice of the novel was as finely honed as it could have been—not merely in comparison to Bernhard, which is a tough ask for any writer, but even in comparison to other Neo-Bernhardian novels. Say what you want about Mark Haber, but he’s truly committed to his impression, and it doesn’t waver. For Dubno, there seems to be a desire to stick to the Bernhardian voice even as she feels a tacit urge to tell the story a different way.

While reading the novel and formulating these thoughts, I had to stop myself. Was I just doing the most obnoxious possible thing a critic can do—namely, telling a writer “I wish you’d written this in a way that aligned with my subjective preference for how such a story might hypothetically be told, rather than following your own vision?”

Well, yes and no. On the one hand, I am kind of doing that, yeah. But on the other, I do think there’s a deeper point to be made that, as presently conceived, Happiness and Love gets in its own way. In all Neo-Bernhardian novels, the voice is something of a pose, and runs the risk of coming across as self-conscious; in Happiness and Love, by virtue of the fact that the novel imitates not only Bernhardian prose but also Bernhardian plot, cracks begin to show with the introduction of more traditionally novelistic elements, and the pose becomes more obvious.

It doesn’t help that at one point roughly halfway through the novel, Dubno lampshades the pose she’s adopted, seeking to mitigate this weakness by calling attention to it. As the narrator reflects on one of the various mediocre artists in her Downtown Manhattan circle, she describes a style of work that ought to strike readers of Happiness and Love as familiar:

“His paintings were done in the style of old master portraits, but the models were holding contemporary objects. Instead of a milkmaid holding a jug of milk, a model with a fashionable mullet haircut was holding a carton of oat milk and wearing orange Crocs sandals. In one painting, commissioned by Dior, the sitter wore head-to-toe Dior couture.…what on earth was the artist doing—what was his idea? The painter had made no aesthetic progress since the old master paintings that hung beside his, and there was no conceptual idea, really, beyond we now have different things than before¹⁵.”

I imagine that Dubno intended this passage as her version of one of the sly metafictional winks that I mentioned earlier, but it struck me as less sly than insecure. For all the sophistication of the apparatus Dubno arranges, all the accuracy of her references and the specificity of her scorn, by choosing to riff upon both a style and a plot devised by someone else, Dubno’s message amounts to little more, in the end, than we now have different things than before. Here are the foibles and phoniness of today’s art crowd, same as the foibles and phoniness of yesterday’s art crowd. And if the central theme of both Happiness and Love and Woodcutters is the fundamental hollowness of both the dreck that passes for art and people who pass off this dreck as art, what does it mean if a novel meant to castigate such fakery is itself a simulacrum? Sure, maybe you could say that’s the point, that the whole venture is intended as something of a meta-level joke, or at least a meta-level joke that’s simultaneously trying to make a more serious statement. But if that’s the case, then making this statement with a borrowed voice feels like less of an indictment and more of a retreat. If Happiness and Love is any indication, Dubno has the spirit to help dismantle the status quo and build something new in its place, but for now all she has to offer are the same old stories.

*

So what is to be done with all these Neo-Bernhardians? Are we as readers (and writers) doomed to forever choose between the Habers of the world, earnest craftsmen content to labor in the old master’s shadow, and the Dubnos, who strive in some ways to escape that shadow yet find themselves semi-willingly trapped?

Of course not. Plenty of writers have already devised their own solutions, achieving what’s in my opinion a pleasing synthesis of Bernhardian prose or themes with enough original elements to keep the text fresh and interesting. But that’s no fun to come right out and claim, because then there’s no controversy.

Whenever a diffuse group of novels get bandied together as an emerging genre, there are bound to be a few inconvenient examples that slip through the cracks. I haven’t seen these novels being discussed as frequently amid the Neo-Bernhardian discourse, and I’m sure there are many more out there that I’m unaware of. For the time being, here are a few books that, at least to me, point the demi-genre in some promising future directions.

Around the same time I read Happiness and Love, I read Eurotrash by the Swiss author Christian Kracht. This was the first novel I read from Kracht, whom I’d long been eager to check out. With a (media-exaggerated) reputation for provocative statements, and a predilection for contrasting the spiritually empty decadence of the West with the supposed holiness of the Global South, I was expecting something like a Mitteleuropean Houellebecq. That wasn’t entirely off the mark: Eurotrash opens with a narrator who’s basically a lightly fictionalized version of Kracht bemoaning, for fifty-odd pages, the blinkered and benighted state of modern Europe, a land whose sickness he finds mirrored in the microcosm of his family, a collection of sexually deviant war profiteers now dwindled down to just himself and his elderly alcoholic mother.

So yeah, whole lotta Houellebecq in there. But as I read on, another voice swiftly rose to the forefront of the narrative. You can probably guess whose.

While the sentences were shorter, and while there were more gaps in the text, more whitespace in which free associations could flow in, the whole time I read the first third of Eurotrash, I thought to myself that the narrator was essentially Murau, the protagonist of Bernhard’s final novel Extinction, shifted forty years into the future and 300 miles west from Wolfsegg to Zürich. Both the fictionalized Kracht and the thinly veiled Bernhard explore, to an obsessive degree, the darkness of their homelands at large and their homes in miniature. Though the tone of Eurotrash is more melancholy and less full of invective than Extinction, and while the prose remains consistently artful, I found myself, reading that opening section, a little bored. This had been done before, and Kracht seemed to be trying too hard, too unsubtly, to do it again. At times amid his musings, the fictionalized Kracht made the subtext overt, as in this reflection:

“It was as if for decades I’d been trailing along the verge of enormous malice and was simply unable to make it out, as if within my assumptions lay only further assumptions, as if I’d been stricken by a disease of the morphic field, a cruel perfidy radiating from the past. As if it had been put into my mind that the circumstances of my childhood and youth were in some way special or extraordinary, when in reality they were steeped not only in bourgeois mediocrity—for that I’d have been able to accept—but also in profound menace.”

Yeah, we get it. It was almost as if all that stuff was going on, because it was. Show don’t tell, ya know?

But then, with greater haste than Murau, who pontificates for more than half of Extinction before enacting his inevitable nostos, the fictionalized Kracht does what any good boy ought to do and visits his mother. From there, thanks to both the originality of the mother herself, who’s one of the more finely drawn and memorable characters I’ve encountered in my recent reading, as well as Kracht’s ability to build an enigmatic, funny, and tight scene—never really Bernhard’s cup of coffee—the narrative opens outward. By sending the narrator and his mother on a roadtrip together, Kracht breaks free of the Bernhardian mode that grips the opening portion of Eurotrash, casting the Neo-Bernhardian novel in a new shape while still maintaining echoes of that familiar voice.

Another telling contrast between going full Bernhard and offering a thoughtful update of his style comes to us from exiled Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya. Back in the 1990s, incensed by the corruption and violence and ignorance of his native land, Castellanos Moya penned a little book called Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. A Bernhardian screed condemning everything under the Salvadoran sun, the novel was passed around that country’s literary underground, prompting book burnings and death threats for Castellanos Moya and his family, and ultimately forcing the author to flee the country. So never let it be said that the Neo-Bernhardians lack real-world impact! Hopefully Dubno doesn’t have to flee Downtown Manhattan anytime soon.

As a political document, Revulsion is impossible to not admire. It took true courage to write, and Castellanos Moya deserves praise for marshaling his art toward noble ends. As a book, I felt like I got the gag after a few pages. Like Haber’s faithful imitation, I once again found myself a little bored by how closely Revulsion hews to the familiar formula, even if that closeness is by design. There was a novelty to seeing Bernhard projected onto a new context, but that novelty wore thin across the course of so many Bernhardian repetitions, and I found myself far more interested in the new context being railed against than the railing itself. Basically, as fun as it is to hear Thomas Bernhard slander pupusas¹⁶, I’d rather listen to a voice that sounded a little more organic to its Salvadoran world.

Fortunately, Castellanos Moya also wrote the excellent novel Senselessness. Set in an obfuscated and nameless Central American country in the aftermath of Civil War, Senselessness relates a writer’s descent into madness as he works on behalf of the Catholic Church to sanitize a report on the army’s extermination of that country’s indigenous population. Darkly funny and deeply wrathful, Senselessness throttles every institution it can get its blood-soaked hands on. In strenuous sentences and unbroken paragraphs that recall Bernhard without devolving into pastiche, Castellanos Moya reaches an ideal midpoint between voice and context, elevating form without sacrificing impact. The novel recalls both the most politically powerful sections of Bernhard’s oeuvre and another classic example of Latin American Neo-Bernhardianism, Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile, which I’ve written more about here. Bolaño, by the way, was a supporter of Castellanos Moya, and my copy of Senselessness contains a lovely blurb from him. Here’s hoping that Senselessness achieves a similar stature in the anglosphere as many of Bolaño’s Bernhard-inflected, deeply political works.

Finally, to spin Bernhard in a completely different direction, I have to plug a weird little book that I have a great deal of affection for, Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ The Organs of Sense. A romp through Enlightenment-era Europe starring G.W. Leibniz, a blind astronomer, and a cat, The Organs of Sense puts its own batshit inflection on Bernhard’s volcanic voice. Of all the books discussed in this overlong essay, this is the one that best reflects, and builds upon, the musicality and absurdity of Bernhard’s prose. This is another way of saying that Sachs has the most fun with Bernhard, treating him not as a canvas for examining the failings of art or lamenting the state of the world or inveighing against political establishments, but as an amusing and slightly unhinged medium by which to narrate the goings-on of various amusing and slightly unhinged characters. That’s not to say that The Organs of Sense is a frivolous novel; threaded throughout the text are themes of reality and illusion, with the blind astronomer’s life story serving as a case study for the key question of epistemology: how can we claim to know that which we claim to know? At the same time, the novel also contains a page on which Sachs, by his own admission, was trying to include the word glockenspiel as many times as possible.

As seen from these novels, and surely many more that I haven’t yet read but will hopefully get to some day, the question of whether Bernhard’s voice can be successfully updated is moot. Multiple authors have already made meaningful iterations on the template he provided, working close enough to the source material that the inspiration remains obvious, but deviating just enough to shift the Neo-Bernhardian movement forward. So if we accept as a premise that this synthesis can be done, then only one question remains: how?

*

I will once again cut to the chase: I don’t know.

There is, clearly, no magic formula. Some of the books discussed in this essay stick too strictly to a Bernhardian narrative voice, and falter due to a lack of originality; others strike out on their own, an admirable effort in itself, but falter due to the precise nature of their diversions. If there’s any consistent theme that’s emerged, beyond my overreliance on humorous asides in footnotes, it’s that strict formal adherence to a given writer’s style produces a novel that may be admirable for the accuracy of its impression, but ultimately fails to further literary conversation or linger in readers’ memories. At worst, this adherence smothers the original elements that might help a novel stand more securely on its own.

In contrast, the writers who managed to make the most worthwhile contributions to Bernhard’s legacy focused less on imitating the late author’s voice or structure, and more on using those elements as a foundation from which to explore and expand upon a particular theme within Bernhard’s work. For Kracht, that theme is the decline of Europe; for Castellanos Moya, it’s political invective; for Sachs, it’s epistemological absurdity.

In short, for Neo-Bernhardians, or any writers looking to emulate any great literary voice, something new must be brought to the table. This is another fairly basic point, and one which, now that I’m thirty-two, no longer strikes me as revelatory. But basic doesn’t mean easy. If it were so easy, after all, then everyone would do it. Which brings everything back to the quote at the top of this essay, about what we ultimately want from our geniuses.

All writers, to one degree or another, wear their influences on their sleeves. Whether they’re swayed by a particular writer or a general movement, echoes of other voices will sound in their work no matter how much effort is made to suppress them. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s an inevitability for any artform. It’s what I learned nearly ten years ago, when I read Open City and Austerlitz, and it’s a lesson I learn afresh with each new book I log on the spreadsheet.

But to accept the premise expressed in the aforementioned quote—to believe that someone out there is closer to the truth you want to express than you are, and therefore better equipped to tell the story you’re seeking to tell—is to give away the game. You probably aren’t going to measure up to the geniuses who inspired you to write in the first place, but in order to create art, artists have to labor in ignorance of that reality. We have to operate under our own self-imposed delusions.

Because there’s something unsatisfying, something unavoidably small-minded, about ceding too much of your voice to an inspiration. More than a lack of creativity or daring, this surrender evinces a lack of maturity. There’s a reason why imitation is typically a young writer’s game, a hallmark of a voice that’s not done developing. It’s a phase that writers ought to grow out of. At the risk of sounding equally immature, the antidote to this line of thought can be found in the work of another Teutonic literary icon: “Today you are You, that is truer than true/There is no one alive who is Youer than You¹⁷.”

So rejoice, Neo-Bernhardians of the world! You’re free to experiment, free to push past the boundaries of form, rather than merely applying that form to your own milieu. You’re free to produce novels that I, a reader who already has a predilection for Bernhardian narratives, might be less likely to enjoy than your imitations, but more likely to respect. Not only are you free to do these things, you’re actually required to do so. Like him or hate him, that’s what Bernhard did.

And yes, in moving past your inspirations, you’ll lose a bit of the magic that accompanied your earliest encounters with the voices that stirred your soul. You’ll discern the mechanisms behind those voices, and the other voices that those voices are emulating, and the points where the voices that once seemed so infallible begin to strain. Whatever magic you’ll make for yourself might not be an adequate substitute for that initial thrill of discovery, and you might not make magic at all. It won’t be easy. But while you’ll be further from genius than ever, you’ll be closer, even if just a little, to whatever it is that only your voice can say.

1. Though Open City is really most similar to The Rings of Saturn, my favorite Sebald novel, which I didn't read until 2019.

2. Nobody does Sebald better than me folks, believe me. People come up to me all the time, tears in their eyes, and say 'nobody conveys the haunting psychological weight of the Holocaust better than you, sir,' and it's so true, it's so true. Because you look at history, which is no more than a scattering of dust upon which we heedlessly trample, you look at it and you say 'wow, this is no more than a scattering of dust upon which we heedlessly trample.' And all the little black and white photos, so beautiful, what a narrative device, maybe the best narrative device, but the fake news media won't tell you that...

3. Answer: kind of, yeah.

4. I also cited Dorr in the first of my own Bernhard essays, because I think he makes many incisive points about Bernhard's cultural context, and what modern imitators often miss by applying Bernhard's voice to the contemporary world.

5. Which Kanakia was kind enough to thoughtfully engage with.

6. Oh, you're not familiar with my much-acclaimed piece of short fiction 'Iced Oat Latte for Thomas,' which has received, as of the time I'm publishing this essay, two whole views?

7. Then again, I love doing impressions—just ask my wife. She’ll tell you how it's my least-annoying quality.

8. Well, McCarthy is also pretty easy to do. It's just that most McCarthy impressions, as with most Pynchon impressions, are too self-evidently laughable to sustain over the course of a short story, much less a novel, and could never give rise to a demi-genre as such.

9. This is why writers who go full run-on, like Fosse or Krasznahorkai, ultimately kind of lose me, even if I admire certain elements of their creative missions. But that's an essay for another day.

10. I haven't read Ada, Haber's latest work, though I intend to.

11. It's sad enough to end up as one, but to go that route willingly is just plain tragic.

12. Key word seek.

13. After all, Bernhard never wrote about electronic dance music, much less gave readers a playlist.

14. Quite literally, given that Dubno has one.

15. It's worth noting that even in this excerpt, you can see that the prose isn't as free-wheeling and full of reversals as Bernhard. It reads more like a conventionally written novel molded into a Bernhardian superstructure, rather than a full-on imitation on the level of voice.

16. How miserable do you have to be to hate pupusas? Bernhard really was fucked in the head.

17. If any Neo-Bernhardian wants to pen the definitive Dr. Seuss/Thomas Bernhard mashup, I will unfortunately definitely read that shit.