New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization and New Writing

I. Who's Speaking?
The Definition of Narrative Voice

When Gérard Genette in his "Discours du récit" ¹ coined the term voice (voix), he was using the lexeme as a metaphoric extension of the grammatical term voice (voix), as in active or passive voice. According to Genette's model, the relationship between narrative discourse and the narrated story can be analysed under three separate headings: temps (tense), voix (voice), and mode (mood). The narrative text, in terms of this metaphor, can be conceptualized as a verb whose grammatical inflections indicate the relationship of discourse to story, as those of the verb in a clause signify the relation between the action denoted by the verb and the speaker's and/or agent's stance and where this relation is temporal (tense), attitudinal (mood), or diathetical ² (voice). Genette's grammatical metaphor, as he explained in his introduction, was in fact borrowed directly from Tzvetan Todorov's earlier schema in "Les catégories du récit littéraire," ³ in which he had distinguished between tense, aspect, and mood. In Todorov's essay aspect had concerned "the way in which the story is perceived by the narrator" (hence what, in Genette's formula, becomes mood), and mood "the type of discourse used by the narrator"--the category that Genette now rechristens voice. As Genette points out, he is trying to correlate the problem of distance (the showing versus telling opposition), which is treated by Todorov under mood, with the question of point of view (ND 29-30), which Todorov treated under aspect. In this manner Genette creates a refunctionalized category mood. As a consequence, the new category of voice spans those issues that concern "the way in which the narrating itself is implicated in the narrative" (ND 31). Genette himself admits that his metaphors should not be taken too literally (ND 30), especially for voice, which in the grammatical definition ("mode of action of the verb in its relations with the subject") bears little enough resemblance to the relation of narrating instance to narrative text and story. After all, homodiegetic (first-person) and heterodiegetic (third-person) narrative do not lend themselves to a comparison with active and passive voice. Genette therefore does well to admit that "these two are merely borrowed, and I make no pretense of basing them on rigorous homologies" (ND 32).

When one moves on to the final chapter of Genette's book, the chapter that deals with voice, the metaphorical adequation becomes even more elusive. The voice chapter does not merely contrast homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative (distinguishing between narratives in which the narrator persona is also an agent on the story level and those where he is not); besides the category "person" (first- versus third-person narrative) it additionally treats the categories "time of the narrating" and "narrative level." The placing of "time of narrating" is particularly odd. Whereas the categories order, frequency, and duration were treated in the temporal realm (under temps in Chapters 1-3 [ND 33-160]), the temporal relation of storytelling in relation to the story is dealt with under voice (ND 215-27). Genette distinguishes four types of narrating: subsequent, prior, simultaneous, and interpolated (ND 217). Next, under the heading of "narrative level," Genette treats the phenomenon of narrative embedding and distinguishes between extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators. Chapter 5 concludes with a consideration of the narrator and the narratee, the two central instances of narrative communication.

So far we have noted that the term voice in Genette is part of a metaphorical schema that reads the relationships between his three narrative levels narration, text, and story in terms of grammatical categories of verbal inflection. Secondly, the concept voice covers a number of phenomena relating to the narrating instance (when, where, and who). The issue of voice in Genette, therefore, cannot be simply reduced to the question "who speaks," or to the subcategory person. ⁴

Nevertheless, in the...