At a Loss for Words: Subtext, Silence, and Sympathy in "Where Is the Voice Coming From?"

Although arguably one of her most admired short stories, Eudora Welty's "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" is also among her most misunderstood. In part, I think, the misunderstanding persists because the story has received scant attention from literary critics: only three full-length articles have appeared since its initial publication in 1963 (see Clerc, Hargrove, and Harrison), supplemented by several summary analyses, usually not longer than one or two pages, in various surveys of Welty's oeuvre (see Binding, Devlin, Gretlund, Pingatore, Schmidt, and Vande Kieft). To a greater extent, though, I think the misunderstanding persists because none of this extant scholarship takes a comprehensive and holistic view of the story in order to examine its particularities and its purposes from a distinctly literary perspective. On the contrary, scholarly critics tend to approach this story with largely utilitarian intent, citing it as a means of opening a discussion of other subjects to which the story itself is only circumstantially related. Insofar as these subjects include either the literary form of the monologue or the socio-political upheavals of the civil rights era, this approach to the story is understandable. After all, "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" reads as a relatively straightforward account of the murder of a civil rights activist in segregated Mississippi, retrospectively narrated in a confessional monologue by the murderer himself while he evades police; and, given that Welty wrote the story following actual events of that kind and in anticipation of an actual murderer's confession, a discussion of its socio-political salience is always going to overshadow any discussion of its comparatively inconsequential literariness and thus leave such a discussion comparatively undeveloped.

As a result of this situation, however, the story has fallen under a critical gaze that reflexively glances away from its powerful literary subtext. With such overwhelming attention paid to its extra-literary properties, and with the importance of its purely literary properties consequently downplayed, critics to date have found no cause to seek out its subtext nor any cause to dwell on that subtext should they spy it in passing. Of course such a disregard for subtext will occasion a misunderstanding of almost any work of literature, not just this particular story; but here it strikes me as a greater shortcoming than usual because, in this story, the subtext is the means by which the author realizes a purpose far more subtle than the mere articulation of a response to a socio-political situation. It seems to me, in other words, that Welty is asking something of her readers in this story—something as difficult to do as it is to discern—but we, as readers, occlude our view of it when we approach the story with an eye toward its socio-political content at the expense of its carefully nuanced artistry.

In this essay, after illustrating the ways in which the existing discussion of this story has disregarded its subtext and so removed the author's purpose from view, I want to throw light on that purpose by examining what exactly Welty is asking of us and how exactly I think she asks it. In 1980, when questioned about her reasons for writing about the tensions of the civil rights era, Welty admitted that she had been unsatisfied by the attempts of northern writers to adequately represent those tensions and felt she could represent them more accurately by writing "from the inside of [the] people" embroiled in them ("Lady of Letters" 294). Given that she had earlier expressed her belief that writing in general involves deploying words to "follow the contours of some continuous relationship between what can be told and what cannot be told" (ES 143), her efforts to write "from the inside of people" would require investing equal significance in what those people are willing to reveal about themselves and what they prefer to pass over in silence. "Where Is the Voice Coming From?" seems to me to have been written precisely along these lines. Each time I read the story, I find myself struck not...