Narrative Voices--Ephemera or Bodied Beings

Monika Fludernik

New Literary History, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001, pp. 707-710 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0034

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/24580

Access provided at 1 Apr 2020 11:28 GMT with no institutional affiliation

 Commentary:
Narrative Voices—Ephemera or Bodied Beings
Monika Fludernik

T
he essays and commentaries in this special issue revolve
around the central question of the ontology of voice: Do voices
exist, or are they merely ghosts that make an ephemeral appear-
ance either in writing or in the filmic medium?
Whereas Andrew Gibson’s contribution radically negates any possible
presence of voice—a presentified voice by definition would be phono-
centric—the other papers are more circumspect in accommodating the
evocations of voice in the text, a plurality of voices even (Richard Aczel),
and they try to trace gradations of presence in the medium of stage
performance. What this very instructive comparison of fiction with the
stage and filmic media demonstrates most forcefully is both the primary
incompatibility between these genres and their uncanny convergence
with regard to the usefulness of the concept of voice. Thus, voice on the
stage is primarily a phenomenon linked with a visible person (who
represents a fictional persona in the story or a narrator persona in a
frame narrative). As in film, some more experimental plays can also
have disembodied voices emanating from the wings or from the top of
the auditorium creating a voice-over effect, and these voices may be both
realistic (offstage sounds) and symbolic (representing interior mono-
logues, “authorial” personae, or imaginary speakers). Especially in
combination with music, the voice factor on stage can even approach a
purely musical notation, and such sound effects may then come to
resemble those in radio plays.
Voice on the radio and voice in film display one obvious affinity, that
of the mechanical nature of sound. Although we see a close-up of an
actress on the screen, what she says to us, the audience, is being
mediated by a sound machine. Fiction lies even further away from the
immediate embodiment of voice in the utterances of actors on stage;
here voice is not, literally, heard, although it spookily seems to be
overheard, imputed, constructed, traced in the medium of written
discourse. Yet because readers frequently conceptualize written stories
as being told, narrated to them, they invariably posit the figure of a
narrator in the text whose voice they seem to apprehend as emanating

New Literary History, 2001, 32: 707–710

708 new literary history

from the pages of the book almost as clearly as if those narrators had a
voice-over function attached to them.
As Manfred Jahn correctly notes, an illusion is produced by some
texts, the illusion of a teller character “talking at us,” sometimes a very
personalized teller character who addresses us explicitly, at other times a
more urbane and suave presenter of authorial views. There are also
other texts in which this illusion of a teller figure (and of his voice) is
displaced by the foregrounded evocation of characters’ “voices”—these,
too, emerging as meaning-effects from the language of the text. It is in
the interpretation of specific passages that such voices become embod-
ied, attributed to the personae of the story or the discourse (characters,
narrators). The same interpretative processes equally result in visualiza-
tions of the fictional world, visualizations that frequently tend to be
frustrated by filmic specifications.
The prevalence of interpretative moves, of readerly strategy, in the
establishment of voice takes me to a second major issue treated by some
of the contributors, the function of naturalization or narrativization in
the reading process. Attributing voice to sentences or even parts of
sentences in narrative texts is a strategy of narrativization. It serves a
mimetic interest since the attribution of linguistic material to characters
or narrators is subtended by a mimetic concept of the narrative text: the
text is supposed to represent a fictional world, and—to the extent that
such a world is being evoked—the reader will start to clothe the dramatis
personae with bodies, minds, opinions, linguistic idiosyncracies—with
speech in all its physiological and ideational qualities. Such narrativization
nowhere exhausts the narrative text, which can always be read in
antirepresentational ways, as words on the page, as thematic and
philosophical reflection, as metaphor or allegory. It is quite true that
narratology has paid little or no attention to such readings, to rhetorical,
allegorical, or poetic alternatives of reading fiction not as story but as
language, as fictio rather than fictum. Natural narratology remains part of
the humanistic project of making sense of stories, not because narratology
is unable to look beyond the narrative factor but because its purpose has
always had to be the clarification of what is specifically narrative in its
subject matter. Differences and différance, narratologists will agree,
serve to constitute, help to create, the ephemeral meaning effects that
narratologists have treated under a variety of labels: voice, focalization,
person, tense, unreliability, and so on. These meaning effects are not
ontological givens, but the representational illusion to which they give
rise frequently produces speakers, narrators, voices that can be heard,
and even addressees to which one feels interpellated to reply. After all,
language serves interactional purposes. A novel may not be a dialogue
narrative voices—ephemera or bodied beings 709

with the author, a conversation with the narrator or a voyeuristic séance

in which we tape the characters’ utterances and thoughts, but it certainly
is an interactional experience for the reader, and the reader will have to
decide how and with what he is interacting when reading a novel.
Constructivist ideology does not result in ontological priorities of a
geometric or theological nature just as natural narrative, as Labov’s
analyses demonstrate, belies the illusion of spontaneity or unconstructed
immediacy. On earth, as for fairly realistic stories, Newtonian parameters
will be used in preference to the correct but unwieldy categories of
relativity theory. Even if, as we all agree, voice is merely a reading effect,
it is nevertheless a recurrent one and one whose operations can be
fruitfully researched in the historical past.
This takes me to the final point, the historicity of the notion of voice,
or of other narratological concepts. Even from the perspective of the
most resolutely constructivist approach, narratological concepts are
never entirely, or unequivocally, fictions without any material basis. Free
indirect discourse is a device that emerges on the basis of the imputation
of a thought or speech act, but that interpretative move needs to be
anchored in the form and/or context of the text. To argue that a
specific passage is free indirect discourse requires a basis in formal or
context-related respects (there are, for instance, expressive markers; or,
there exists a context that allows for the thesis that X said something).
For these reasons, a diachronic analysis of narrative forms is not a futile
gesture towards a traditional, humanistic worldview; it is a perfectly
legitimate investigation of texts over a period of time during which
formal and interpretative conventions will have changed. Only on the
basis of mapping these changes can one begin to ask why interpretations
sometimes come to veer from one extreme to the other, as in the case of
The Vicar of Wakefield. It would indeed be highly interesting to know
which earlier text first lent itself to a reading as unreliable narration
both historically and anachronistically (as The Vicar). Sidney’s Arcadia
certainly did not, nor, I presume, did Piers Plowman. Which takes us to
the point that not every text can be read as unreliable narration, just as
not every passage in a novel can be interpreted as free indirect
discourse.
To apply this to the issue of voice. Language is a tissue of echoes, and
every text constructs its unique combination of earlier discourses. But
these “voices” are not manifestations of narratological “voice” (pace
Richard Aczel); they are not part of story-related realizations of
expressivity. George Garrett’s voices tease us precisely because they are
highly charged with expressivity but fail to mark clearly the source of
that expressivity. Yet the attempt to find a source for utterances—an
710 new literary history

attempt that is part of a reading strategy and not an essentialist project

at all—must not be confused with logocentrism: constructivist poetics
becomes necessary precisely at the point where writing predominates
and an interpretation of meaning effects needs to be resorted to. The
origins of voices posited by narratology are such meaning effects.
It is here that deconstructionists and cognitivists really part company;
in the clash between an empirical reliance on data, for instance, markers
of expressivity (even if these are then interpreted in ambivalent ways),
and an attitude of “anything goes” or panta rhei. The latter attitude tends
to have the awkward consequence of being true but not very helpful in
a given situation, whereas the former may not quite meet the standards
of rigorous philosophical enquiry. But what the heck, it works!