The Sublime Meets the Real

Page 18 American Book Review the sublime meets the reAl Keya Mitra The reliGious and oTher ficTions Christina Milletti Carnegie Mellon University Press http://www.cmu.edu/universitypress 191 pages; paper, $16.95 unnAturAl innovAtions Aaron Chandler unnaTural voices: exTreMe narraTion in Modern and conTeMPorary ficTion Brian Richardson The Ohio State University Press http://www.ohiostatepress.org 166 pages; cloth, $55.95; paper, $24.95 “What matter who’s speaking, someone said what matter who’s speaking.” This utterance, taken from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1958), presents us with a miniaturization of the problem of voice in fiction. Is it, after all, an honest question, a bare declaration, a taunt, a note of grief, or something else altogether? Michel Foucault, for example, read it as thoroughly rhetorical and thus an affirmation of the priority of discourse over author, of statement over speaker, so that who speaks matters less than what comes to be spoken. Less polemically, one might read Brian Richardson’s recent addition to the study of narrative, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, not as a definitive answer to Beckett’s dislocated paradox of a non-question, but rather as an atlas charting its several answers. In his slender but ambitious volume, Brian Richardson offers a model of narrative voice that is both supple enough to attend to the dizzying variety of innovations in contemporary fiction and precise enough not to add to the confusion that such works often produce. This is no easy task, for the texts that most interest Richardson are precisely those which traditional narrative theories (of, say, Gérard Genette, Seymour Chatman, and Gerald Prince) are least adept at analyzing, and hence most likely to sideline as aberrant: the nouveau roman, the postmodernist novel, and works of magical realism. Herded together in the close quarters of this study, these varied texts occasionally give the impression of a P. T. Barnum bestiary: stories told by animals, by corpses, by a Minotaur, a dozen novels in which “you” tell the tale, and a score in which “we” do. But the sheer number of these “unnatural voices” speaks persuasively to the critical need to do more than discount them as marginal aberrations. If “who’s speaking” matters at all, it matters here as well. The foremost merits of Richardson’s study are twofold, and both derive from his thoroughly empirical methodology. First, he provides a valuable lexicon for the analysis of texts in the experimental traditions. One can easily imagine concepts such as the “permeable narrator,” “denarration,” and the “fraudulent narrator” entering the general critical discussion of contemporary fiction, not because they yield some jargonic weight but because they are reflections of more incisive thinking about the action of voice in narrative discourse. This freshness of thought is nowhere more evident than in Richardson’s chapters on second-person and first-person-plural narratives, which he takes to be the two “major new form[s] of telling a story.” It is here that Richardson proves particularly resourceful by illuminating continuities across texts that differ vastly in time, place, and purpose. One finds considerations of authors as varied as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Vladimir Nabokov, Nuruddin Farah, and Lorrie Moore all in a handful of pages. This breadth of sample, the study’s second prime virtue, uncovers sets of shared formal interests cutting across cultural and ideological borders, while at the same time revealing how many of these seemingly outré innovations were already present in canonical authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and, of course, Beckett. Richardson also includes a chapter on experimental theater, which further enriches his consideration of innovative presentations of voice and broadens the reach of his claims. Some of those claims, such as that “there is no inherent ideological valence in any narrative form, despite the vigorous claims of its various champions,” will surely rankle some partisans, but because Richardson is unfailingly attentive to the various ways in which form may flexibly serve a host of ideological ends, they will not find him easy to dismiss. Richardson provides a valuable lexicon for the analysis of texts in the experimental traditions. Clearly much is gained...