Throwing Voices

In the article which gave rise to the present discussion of voice, "Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts," I called for a qualitative approach to narrative voice, arguing that the classical Genettean question of "who speaks?" in a narrative needs to be if not supplanted then at least supplemented by the question of how narrators, characters, and other vocal instances in texts are constructed by the reader to speak. ¹ While the more narratological contributions in the present special issue do not critically engage with this emphasis on the "how" of narrative voice, they nonetheless continue to rely exclusively on an equation of voice with an identifiable speaker persona or function. Monika Fludernik even goes as far as to argue that where voice cannot be attributed cleanly to either a character or narrator persona--as she perceives the case to be in the prose of George Garrett--the issue of voice can be "discarded altogether." The fascinating excerpts she cites from Garrett, however, themselves amply demonstrate the importance of maintaining a qualitative understanding of voice. Where voices are not readily attributable, they do not simply disappear, and Garrett's prose is clearly rich in heteroglossia, double-voiced discourse, and other forms of polyvocality.

Andrew Gibson is thus at least partly justified in identifying in narratology's limited equation of voice and speaker figure/function a hankering after a fixed, unifying, and originary presence behind textual utterances. To argue that where there is no identifiable speaker there can be no voice is indeed to anchor voice in physical presence and to remain deaf to voices of a more "disembodied" kind; one does not even need to think of the disembodied voices of Samuel Beckett--it is enough to entertain voice factors like echoes, quotations, cliches, that cannot be said to originate in the larynx of an individual speaker. Gibson, however, seems to me to replace what he sees as the presence-oriented, humanist "theology" of narratology with a theology of his own--or rather, as theologies are never entirely one's own, of someone else. For Gibson, writing is not voice, but silence, the effacement of voice and a repudiation of presence. Theorized as an eradicable and irreducible play of différance, writing perpetually slips through the net of fixable meaning. Theory is reduced to a perpetual restatement of its (theological) self-evidence and (narcissistic) circularity: all that theory can say about the text is that the text iterates the theory. The difference is always the same. How theory can nonetheless make apodeictic statements ("there are in fact no narrative voices") remains untheorized, and, perhaps, also beside the point. For, as ever in theology, it is not so much logic as ethics which delimits the boundaries of the sayable; and while for one creed the naive humanist faith in the ability to hear the other is a good thing, it is, for another, heresy.

There are, to be sure, no voices in written texts; there are only ways--some more useful than others--of metaphorically conceiving texts as voiced in the act or play of reading. As all the contributors to this issue seem to agree that what Manfred Jahn aptly terms the "metaphorical slippage" of talking about voices in written texts is both unavoidable and helpful, let me, in closing, slip metaphor the last word.

Picture (hear) a ventriloquist working his dummy--a Charles Dickens figure on tour with a puppet called Boz. Imagine he has the dummy tell a story in several voices; not only the voices of the characters he portrays, but also other voices pertinent to aspects of their characterization. Describing one he waxes ironical, or lyrical, or mock-heroic; portraying another he adopts a voice that is bumptious, unctuous, outrageous, shy, or coy. These voices are intended to tell us something about the characters in question without either directly quoting them or making explicit statements about them. To whom, if anyone, are we to attribute these voices? To the dummy? Can the dummy really be said to have...