Voice to Voice: Reflections on the Art of Conversation

The idea of voice has certainly come a long way in the several decades since it was first introduced into literary studies ¹ --not to mention the many centuries since medieval logicians formulated their distinction between "univocal" and "equivocal" terms. After reading the contributions to this volume of New Literary History, indeed, one senses a pervasive anxiety that theorizing about voices and the voice may have strayed a little too far from home.

Take narratology to start with. Literary humanists who may once have warmed to the idea that novelists can create ironic distances by orchestrating the "voices" of more or less unreliable "narrators" are likely to be worried by more recent attempts to treat the field of narrative voice as if it were an objective datum, whose lineaments can be expected to reveal themselves to scientific narratologists in rather the same way that the structure of the genome has yielded to the advances of geneticists. Can we seriously suppose--they will say--that every possible form of narrative is innately prefigured in the structure of literature as such? Are we to believe that novelists who have come up with new ways of telling stories are doing no more than stumbling upon methods that were already latent in the pregiven nature of narrative? And ought not any decent raconteur to be able to come up with more narrative stratagems than are dreamt of even in the most sophisticated and up-to-date narratology?

Be that as it may, the extension of the idea of narrative voice beyond the comfortable old themes of irony and unreliability has undoubtedly put it under strain, and today's laborers in the fields of narratology--well represented here by Richard Aczel, Monika Fludernik, Andrew Gibson, Manfred Jahn and Brian Richardson--evidently find it something of an embarrassment. Aczel, fearing that references to the voice may have a tendency to tie narratology to some notion of a "unified speaker position," conceived "as origin, as pure self-presence," prefers to think of voice as "echo" or "ventriloquism." Meanwhile, Fludernik rejects "the voice model" altogether, deploring its assumption of "the narrator as a hypostatized entity," and Jahn points to a general agreement that "talking of voices in written texts involves a certain amount of metaphorical slippage." Richardson takes the precaution of directing our attention to what he calls "literal, human voices," particularly in "materialist metatheater." After all this it would be hard to dissent from Gibson's conclusion that the notion of a narrative voice has "long ago worked free from any material reference"--in other words that it is not only "metaphorical," but also embedded in "a tradition of metaphorization so deeply entrenched as apparently to have forgotten the very difference between the literal and the metaphorical." He therefore seeks to pull us away from "idealism" towards a "materialism of narrative voice" and of its "properly material existence."

Literary historians seem to be experiencing much the same qualms about the relations between "metaphorical" and "material" voices as narrative theorists. Bruce Smith swims against the tide in claiming that writing can, in political terms, be "a falsification of the presence of speech," but when Kate Brown and Howard Kushner investigate the meaning of cursing they come to the conclusion that it refreshingly disrupts the idea of "the sovereignty of voice," and David Schur finds Freud vainly struggling to "control the voice." In the meantime, John Picker has investigated the uncanny process of "disembodying" the voice by means of sound recording, and Juan Suárez notes an equivalence between voices and "spirits." Anthony Spearing shares the general unease about the seductions of a "literal voice" that issues from the "mouth, lips, and tongue of a human individual," and he tries to call a halt to the entire "narrative voice production-line" by arguing that it reduces all kinds of literature to varieties of the specifically nineteenth-century genre of dramatic monologue. In this context Dorrit...