Inhuman Voices

The contributors to this issue admirably extend and reconceptualize theoretical constructs of voice and narration. Manfred Jahn's investigation into narrative voice and agency in drama is a salutary foray into a topic that is both rich and strangely undertheorized. He offers an original outline of reception-oriented theories of drama--poetic drama, theater studies, and reading drama--that simultaneously comprehends much theoretical work of the past seventy-five years and situates the subject as particularly ripe for narratological intervention. This is true even if we see his term of synthesis, "reading drama," as already giving birth to its semiotic antithesis in performance art, a theatrical medium that plays at and beyond the edges of drama, narrative, and language. Particularly important is his presentation of the three types of narrators within or behind a play. One sincerely hopes that narrative and dramatic criticism will not be so neglectful of the re-sources of the stage (and the reading of its stage directions) in the future. The further question that then presents itself of whether the anonymous and impersonal narrative function responsible for the se-lection and arrangement of the events is the same as the one which is responsible for the text of the stage directions; I suspect it will be difficult to keep these figures distinct. In addition, the attention Jahn draws to Pericles' Gower, a somewhat ineffectual narrator, raises the possibility that the recent attention devoted to rethinking the unreliable narrator will extend to such limited or duplicitous narrators as Shakespeare's Gower or Rumor, the "presenter" of 2 Henry IV.

Andrew Gibson's essay is cunningly composed and beautifully written. Unfortunately, the elegant symmetry of its presentation is also responsible for its major conceptual weakness. Gibson's position is based on an opposition between literary narrative in which voice is always metaphorical and cinematic narratives in which actual voices are "haunted" by writing. This dyad can only be maintained by ignoring the many adjacent works that fail to fit these depictions. In oral narratives, as I have indicated above, voice is literal and the text is entirely coextensive with its being spoken; narrative and performance are identical. At the same time, Gibson's formulation must ignore the numerous cinematic experiments that incorporate the very elements of spontaneity and improvisation which he claims the medium invariably excludes. Even if, for the sake of the argument, we were to grant his claim that "voice in film is no more a part of an immediate representation of a living world there before expression than is writing," the proper response might well be, "All right, but so what?" Performances that include spontaneous and improvised representations can be found throughout our culture, from minimally scripted performance art to improvised comedy acts to unexpected turns of events on live television shows. What is supposed to be so crucial about unscripted, immediate, or extemporaneous voices that their absence in commercial films is of any theoretical significance? Further, Gibson's essay is grounded on Derrida's claim that the Western philosophical tradition privileges speech over writing, certainly one of the least defensible formulas of deconstruction. Deconstruction demands a clear-cut set of opposed positions even if it must fabricate them, and is relatively helpless before a shifting field of intersecting trajectories. Essence, origin, identity, and teleology have long been under attack within avant-garde films and dramas; it is these works that are in the greatest need of narratological investigation.

Monika Fludernik importantly points out the fallacies of the critical practice of projecting real-life parameters into the reading process and foregrounds the corresponding limitations of theorists who feel compelled to invent a hypostatized narrator figure who is responsible for each act of narration. For some time, it has been understood that literary characters function both as real people might and as purely verbal constructs do; surely it is time to grant the same dual status to narration: it might be constructed as if uttered or written by an individual human, or it might be a...