Narrative Voices--Ephemera or Bodied Beings

The essays and commentaries in this special issue revolve around the central question of the ontology of voice: Do voices exist, or are they merely ghosts that make an ephemeral appearance either in writing or in the filmic medium?

Whereas Andrew Gibson's contribution radically negates any possible presence of voice--a presentified voice by definition would be phonocentric--the other papers are more circumspect in accommodating the evocations of voice in the text, a plurality of voices even (Richard Aczel), and they try to trace gradations of presence in the medium of stage performance. What this very instructive comparison of fiction with the stage and filmic media demonstrates most forcefully is both the primary incompatibility between these genres and their uncanny convergence with regard to the usefulness of the concept of voice. Thus, voice on the stage is primarily a phenomenon linked with a visible person (who represents a fictional persona in the story or a narrator persona in a frame narrative). As in film, some more experimental plays can also have disembodied voices emanating from the wings or from the top of the auditorium creating a voice-over effect, and these voices may be both realistic (offstage sounds) and symbolic (representing interior monologues, "authorial" personae, or imaginary speakers). Especially in combination with music, the voice factor on stage can even approach a purely musical notation, and such sound effects may then come to resemble those in radio plays.

Voice on the radio and voice in film display one obvious affinity, that of the mechanical nature of sound. Although we see a close-up of an actress on the screen, what she says to us, the audience, is being mediated by a sound machine. Fiction lies even further away from the immediate embodiment of voice in the utterances of actors on stage; here voice is not, literally, heard, although it spookily seems to be overheard, imputed, constructed, traced in the medium of written discourse. Yet because readers frequently conceptualize written stories as being told, narrated to them, they invariably posit the figure of a narrator in the text whose voice they seem to apprehend as emanating from the pages of the book almost as clearly as if those narrators had a voice-over function attached to them.

As Manfred Jahn correctly notes, an illusion is produced by some texts, the illusion of a teller character "talking at us," sometimes a very personalized teller character who addresses us explicitly, at other times a more urbane and suave presenter of authorial views. There are also other texts in which this illusion of a teller figure (and of his voice) is displaced by the foregrounded evocation of characters' "voices"--these, too, emerging as meaning-effects from the language of the text. It is in the interpretation of specific passages that such voices become embodied, attributed to the personae of the story or the discourse (characters, narrators). The same interpretative processes equally result in visualizations of the fictional world, visualizations that frequently tend to be frustrated by filmic specifications.

The prevalence of interpretative moves, of readerly strategy, in the establishment of voice takes me to a second major issue treated by some of the contributors, the function of naturalization or narrativization in the reading process. Attributing voice to sentences or even parts of sentences in narrative texts is a strategy of narrativization. It serves a mimetic interest since the attribution of linguistic material to characters or narrators is subtended by a mimetic concept of the narrative text: the text is supposed to represent a fictional world, and--to the extent that such a world is being evoked--the reader will start to clothe the dramatis personae with bodies, minds, opinions, linguistic idiosyncracies--with speech in all its physiological and ideational qualities. Such narrativization nowhere exhausts the narrative text, which can always be read in antirepresentational ways, as words on the page, as thematic and philosophical reflection, as metaphor or allegory. It is quite true...