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New Literary History 32.3 (2001) 711-713



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Commentary:
Silence of the Voice

Andrew Gibson


My position on narrative theory and voice might be put like this: voice is irreducibly heterogeneous to narrative, at least insofar as narrative becomes an object for theory and criticism. As Brian Richardson says, self-evidently, oral narrative exists. At any given time, an innumerable number of vocal narrative performances are taking place. The study of narrative, however, is not the study of those performances, from which it automatically and de facto abstracts. At the same time, narrative theory cannot study its objects without some form of technological mediation. But if voice is irreducibly heterogeneous to narrative--if the "dematerialized" object the theorist produces is specific to and determined by theory itself--that is commonly unthinkable to the theorist. Without the trace of "original nature," the very basis of the theoretical or scientific endeavor is imperiled. As a matter of principle, the theorist cannot acknowledge his or her world as one of te\chne\ decisively separated from physis. But narratology is thus caught up in an illogicality, in that, in the concept of voice, it continually seeks to restore the sense of a human presence whose loss or distance is in fact its own founding condition. In my essay here and elsewhere, I have argued that there is no escaping that double-bind. In one way or another, the other contributors to this issue all work within it, and my own essay is not markedly different from theirs. I simply try to recognize the double-bind for what it is and to work with it a little more expressly.

While Manfred Jahn's and Brian Richardson's essays admirably demonstrate the relevance of the traditional conception of narrative voice to drama, both also illustrate my point. People speak when plays are performed. But Richardson and Jahn are nostalgic for a voice beyond voice, for a textual voice or voices, the voice "read silently," in Richardson's phrase. For Richardson himself, the voices in question are those of dramatis personae irrespective of their materialization in performance. For Jahn, they are voices ex machina, "heard" in the textual apparatus and the stage directions. But in both instances, the point is the same: to deal with voice per se in drama would be to deal with questions of the event, the unique, unrepeatable occasion, material questions of timbre, [End Page 711] cadence, emphasis, vocal nuance. Richardson and Jahn work rather to occlude the difference between dramatic narrative as it is read and as it is seen and heard. Thus a text whose very condition would appear to be one of awaiting embodiment comes to seem inhabited by its own ghostly body or bodies. But if the dramatic text itself is thus "humanized," its limits are also fixed. For to define a voice or voices within the text is also to begin to stabilize it, to determine its outlines, to endow it with particular meanings. It is to give it a kind of quasi-substantial existence. This latter anticipates or seeks to determine the actual, substantial existence that the play may assume on stage.

To my mind, then, Richardson and Jahn remain in thrall to what they hear as the ghostly voice or voices of the text. Monika Fludernik's essay impresses me differently. It seems to me to begin to modify certain positions she took in her major study Towards a "Natural" Narratology. That book insists on the importance of what Fludernik called "narrativization." The term is meant to indicate the way in which readers naturalize even the most intractable narrative texts. Narrativization partly involves the production of a voice or voices. In her essay here, once again, Fludernik initially insists that, whatever questions are raised at the theoretical level of analysis, for readers, narrativization is an automatic reflex. Fludernik has made this assertion repeatedly, and always problematically. How can she be sure of what readers in general get up to? Is theoretical analysis not one among many forms of reading? In reality, Fludernik maintains the conviction of a voice in...

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