Understanding as Over-hearing: Towards a Dialogics of Voice

The splendid conceit which closes Shakespeare's Sonnet 18 tells us all we know on earth and all we need to know about the relationship between speech and writing: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." For the poet, for his beloved Youth, and, indeed, for the poet's failed metaphor itself (the less lovely and less temperate summer's day), writing is the absolute guarantor of eternal presence--so long, of course, as all three can depend upon the voice of another to breathe them back to life. Such breath, however, is necessarily ephemeral, no more than a mortal sigh against the permanence of the written word which outlives all instances of its vocal iteration and plucks the beloved from the shade of death by transfiguring him "in eternal lines to time." If Shakespeare's couplet is "logocentric," its logos is the word of writing, not of speech, which is, as Spenser reminds us in a sonnet that builds on essentially the same conceit, as transient as words written on a palimpsest of sand and washed away by the sea. But to what end is this logos--this writing as the guarantee of eternal presence--to be preserved, if not for the seeing, breathing (dying) other, whose eyes, Shakespeare tells us in a further conceit in Sonnet 23, are also ears: "To hear with eyes belongs to love's fine wit." The seeing of reading is always at once a hearing.

This essay will explore the resources for an understanding of reading as an over-hearing of voices. The over is used in four discrete but related senses: it is at once the complex over of overdetermination; the temporal, historical over of something repeated, done over again; the incomplete, falling short over of overlooking; and the combination of fortuitousness and intention that informs the over of the more usual sense of over-hearing. Thus the over-hearing of voices in literary texts will be understood as something overdetermined, unfinal, in process, and historically situated: the intentional activity of a subject whose intentions are subjected to the historical dialogue which renders his or her speech possible. In an earlier article in this journal on "Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts," I offered a critique of structuralist narratological approaches to voice as a unified speaker position or textual level and argued instead for a notion of voice as a composite configuration of quoted speech styles, closing with a call for a more fully reader-oriented understanding of voice. ¹ This paper is an attempt to move further toward such an understanding. I begin by showing how the essentially Bakhtinian notion of voice as composite and quotational which I developed in my earlier article can provide a fruitful response to the critical anxieties of deconstruction concerning voice. Next, I argue that by returning Derrida's notion of différance to Heidegger's concept of der Unter-Schied ("dif-ference") from which it logically--and perhaps even philologically--derives, we can tap a richly suggestive resource for an understanding of dialogically overdetermined over-hearing. Then I return to Bakhtin to pursue a number of hints in the later work as to how his essentially text-immanent notion of discursive polyphony can be rethought in terms of a reader-oriented approach by critically articulating his dialogism with the hermeneutic dialogism of Hans-Georg Gadamer and the reception aesthetics of Hans Robert Jauss. Finally, I consider the turn towards the reader in constructivist, cognitive, and "natural" narratology, exploring parallels and discontinuities with my own approach to reading as over-hearing.

I. Deconstruction and Heteroglossia

Voice, conceived as origin, as pure self-presence, has, for some thirty years, figured as the bugbear of a whole species of literary and critical theory. From Jacques Derrida's anxieties about "the privilege of the phone" in Speech and Phenomena and the subsequent project of...