The Secret Voice

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

The Secret Voice (originally published in French as Le Surveillant,
1982) offers 10 short stories remarkably consistent in their worldview.
Unlike many Quebec writers, Gaetan Brulotte—who teaches at the
University of South Florida—does not set his stories in a recognizable
Quebec, or attempt to sound his own culture. Instead, he explores
universals of contemporary life.

In translating this volume, novelist Matt Cohen did well to also change
its title, for what is now the title story is a key to the whole book. A
young woman is inspired by the erotic “secret voice” of a stranger
on the telephone; then, more than 30 years later, she is shocked almost
to madness upon learning the identity of the person whose voice had
given meaning to her life.

In the other stories as well, characters hear secret “voices” that
direct and often ruin their lives: the voices of duty, of guilt, of
custom and procedure, of professionalism. A sentry spends his life
guarding a wall, then is fired for writing his memoir of the experience;
a street sweeper follows duty by sweeping an injured man off the
sidewalk into a manhole; a desk clerk gives labyrinthine directions for
finding the toilet in a building right out of Kafka or Borges.

In still other stories, the “voice” heard is not that of authority
but of its opposites, freedom and imagination: a never-ending series of
meetings is held to find a purpose for a group, but its fractious
members go philosophically in different directions. A man travelling to
join his dying mother runs off with a young woman he has met on the
train. And in the most striking case of all, a defendant in the
logic-bound setting of a courtroom explains his story in wildly poetic
terms: “I love the soft availability of things, the goodness of day
poured over desire, the green sharpness of naked bodies placed before
white walls, the fitting-together of voices when they touch, the
quivering yellow of the present, corollas opened near trembling branches
and the tender intimacy of stones.” The judge responds with the brutal
order “LOCK HIM UP.”

In Brulotte’s fictional world, both those who dream and those who do
not dream are failures. The world of authority is monstruous,
Kafkaesque, but the individual’s own impulses are equally dictatorial
and destructive. There is no middle ground.