Toward a Zeroth Voice: Theorizing Voice in Children's Literature with Deleuze

[The] voice that speaks the text is what brings life to literature, and it is this voice that children lose as they learn to read privately. Private reading is silent reading. The reader loses the ability to hear a voice that speaks the text or the ability to call that voice out.

(McGillis, "Calling" 24)

Roderick McGillis remarks in his paper, "Calling a Voice Out of Silence: Hearing What We Read," that the concept of voice is inherently linked with narrative and experiences of narratives. Early experiences of literature are oral and communal, actively shared and joyous. Private, silent reading, for McGillis, is "perfunctory" and "monotone" (25). He is concerned that when young readers progress toward such private reading, they may lose the ability to hear a voice in texts. For McGillis, "to save the reader from the reign of awful darkness and silence, we must give him voice; to save the text, we must save its voice" (25).

Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher, this paper explores the rhizome of voices that readers "hear" in texts and postulates that voice may be considered as something virtual, a symbiotic fusion with the text created through a Deleuzian becoming. If a young reader is able to enter into a becoming with a text, then the voice of the text can indeed be saved. This paper looks in turn at the coming together of book and reader, the rhizome of voices emanating from the book, and the complexity of authorship from a Deleuzian perspective. Through a consideration of Deleuze's concepts of major and minor literature, this paper shows how the simulacral nature of voices present in children's literature can lead to what Deleuze terms a collective assemblage of enunciation. This paper, therefore, moves away from traditional levels of discourse, going beyond notions of narrator, author, and reader, and instead looks for the voice created through this collective assemblage: a zeroth voice, a term inspired by the zeroth law of thermodynamics, the most fundamental of the four laws, albeit developed last. It is my contention that this zeroth voice liberates the reader from all the voices present in the creation of the text. It is a voice that does not impose any of these subject positions.

To explore these Deleuzian concepts and their application to the critical study of children's fiction, this paper draws predominantly on the Kamo quartet, written by the well-known and respected French author Daniel Pennac. As is often the case with French children's literature, Pennac's work is less well-known in the Anglophone world; however, this series is of particular interest when theorizing voice because of its somewhat unusual narrator, Kamo's lifelong friend, the otherwise nameless Toi (You).

Daniel Pennac and His Oeuvre

A teacher of French until 1995, when he committed to his writing full-time, Daniel Pennac is himself interested in the question of what draws a reader to a text. In his philosophical treatise entitled Comme un roman (translated into English by David Homel as Better than Life), which questions how a love of reading begins, how it may be lost, and how it can be regained, Pennac defines more succinctly his ideas for nurturing young people's desire to read. This text also features his now well-known manifesto of readers' rights: a list of ten points designed to examine the norms of reading and to reinstate the notion of pleasure in reading.

Each volume in Daniel Pennac's Kamo series represents a school subject or related theme, reflecting his view that "children want to talk about school" ("Daniel Pennac"). Kamo, l'idée du siècle deals with the transition from primary to secondary school; Kamo, l'agence Babel, considers the challenges of learning modern foreign languages, in particular English; L'évasion de Kamo addresses the subject of history and sees Kamo's mother leave for Eastern Europe to research her family roots; and Kamo et moi raises the problem of a feared school teacher and the difficulties of writing imaginative essays in French. Pennac...