The Johns Hopkins University Press

Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts
Author(s): Richard Aczel

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 29, No. 3, Theoretical Explorations (Summer, 1998), pp.
467-500
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts
Richard Aczel
Voice, in the
study of narrative discourse, is a complex and
problematic category. As an entity attributed to (silent) written
texts, the concept of voice inevitably raises questions of ontology
and metaphoricity which remain inseparable from its more technical
delimitation as a textual function or effect. The question of "who
speaks?" in narrative discourse invites the further question of whether
texts can really be said to "speak" at all, and if so what are the theoretical
motivations and implications of the metaphor of "speech" for "writing"?1
This paper addresses these questions from an essentially pragmatic
It argues for a as to functional,
perspective. qualitative, opposed merely
concept of voice and emphasizes the centrality of stylistic expressivity?
features of style which evoke a deictic center or subjectivity?in the
identification of voice effects and their agents. Positing voice as a textual
effect rather than an anima, it insists on a radical
originary separation
between textual
signs of stylistic agency and projected (metatextual)
principles of narrative organization and unity (such as the Boothian
author or the Benvenistean
implied sujet d'?nonciation). Finally, these
textual signs are themselves construed as a configuration of stylistic and
rhetorical reconstructed into a or
strategies composite subjective entity,
voice, the reader.
by
Although the frame of reference of such a concept of voice naturally

includes the speech of both narrators and characters in narrative fiction,
this paper concerns itself above all with voice in its narratorial aspect,
which continues to constitute one of the most controversial areas in
narrative The first three sections offer a critical of a
theory. survey
number of influential
narratological (Genette, discussions of voice
Chatman, Lanser, Coste),2 focusing of narrative on questions
level,
narratorial (c)overtness, and ontology. The fourth section considers the
much debated role of voice in free indirect discourse, while the fifth
contrasts Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "double-voiced discourse"?the
implications of which have yet to be fully explored by narratology?with
Ann Banfield's critique of dual voice theory. The final section addresses
the question of "narratorless narrative" as raised most challengingly by
Banfield and Fludernik,3 and I conclude by briefly mapping the basic
New Literary History, 1998, 29: 467-500

468 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
a
territory of pragmatic, qualitative, and dialogic approach to narrative
voice. Most of my narrative examples are drawn from the later fiction of
Henry James, where issues of voice are clearly foregrounded. My
discussion of these examples attempts to activate the qualitative concept
of voice to which this paper appeals, identifying in James an overt and
distinctly audible narratorial agency on the basis of rhetorical strategy
and stylistic expressivity, rather than solely according to the more widely
adduced narratological principles of explicit (grammatical) self-refer
ence, direct reader address, comment, and
interpretation.
Voice and Narrative Level
"The term voice in narratology has been coined in connection with the
question 'who speaks' (Genette), usually in distinction from the narra
tive categories perspective or point of view (Genette's 'Mood'), which
correlate with 'who sees?"' (FL 325). G?rard Genette's delimitation of
the concept of voice in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method remains
the starting point for most discussions of the term in narratology. While
few today would deny the importance of this distinction between voice
and perspective, the determination of narrative voice in terms of the
question "who speaks?" has considerable limitations. In fact, for Genette,
the question of "who" incorporates the further questions of "when" and
"from where"?which is reflected in Genette's division of his chapter on
voice into three discrete areas: time, level, and person. The question of
how a narrator speaks does not appear, for this typology, to belong to the
issue of voice. This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, and most
obviously, the question of who can often be (although doesn't in
principle have to be) predicated on the question of how. To identify
"who least in situations where the attribution of voice is
speaks"?at
ambiguous (classically, for example, in a text like Virginia Woolf s To the

Lighthouse)?it may be necessary first to identify how a particular voice
speaks, and to distinguish it from other competing voices. Secondly, and
more crucially, a concept of voice that is inherently deaf to qualitative
factors such as tone and idiom will be doing little to justify its name.
(And nothing?except perhaps confusion?is gained by rechristening
person, time, and level as "voice.") The following three examples from
Henry James's The Ambassadors will suggest the centrality of the how of
narrative voice: (1) "Pagan?yes, that was, wasn't it? what Chad would
logically be. Itwas what he must be. It was what he was."4 (2) "On leaving
him he repaired straight to his own room, but with the prompt effect of
feeling the compass of that chamber resented by his condition" (A 68).
(3) "It wouldn't do at all, he saw, that anything should come up for him

HEARING VOICES IN NARRATIVE TEXTS 469
at Chad's hand but what specifically was to come; the greatest diver
gence from which would be precisely the element of any lubrication of
their intercourse by levity" (A 174). In analyzing these three examples,
Genette would be forced to argue that the "voice" remains the same in
each instance: extradiegetic (in terms of level) and heterodiegetic (in
terms of person), with internal focalization governing the perspective.
While it is perfectly acceptable to argue that (1) and (2) are enunciated
by the same narrator, this does not alter the idiomatic (vocal) difference
between the two enunciations?the first evoking the voice of the
reflector-character, Strether, and the second representing one of the
narrator's more formal and abstract voices.5 In (3) there is clearly a
combination of voices, the shift from one to the other foregrounding
their difference. Genette himself, as a highly perceptive reader of texts
and hearer of voices, does not suffer from the same deafness to voice as
his categories. Indeed, he offers some discussion of quotation and free
indirect discourse?which, arguably, concern at least part of what is
going on in (1) and (3)?not, however, revealingly, under the heading
of voice (Chapter 5), but under the heading of mood (Chapter 4).6
Considering his own (borrowed) grammatical definitions of mood ("the
different forms of the verb that are used to affirm more or less the thing
in question, and to express . . . the different
points of view from which
the action is looked at" [ND161]) and voice ("the mode of action of the
verb for its relations to the subject" [ND 213]), this allocation is
questionable. Even in Genette's modal discussion in the fourth chapter
of Narrative Discourse, where the narratorial appropriation of character
idiom is touched upon, we are still not presented with the analytical
means of identifying and typologizing the species of narratorial idiom
represented by (2) and the second part of (3). The point here, however,
is not to identify internal weaknesses in Genette's argument; rather, to
insist that his limited characterization of voice (and its attendant
preoccupation with categorizing narrator types and levels) ultimately
forecloses more insight into voice than it opens.
Degrees of Narratorial Overtness
The first steps toward reopening (opening up) the concept of voice is
to restore the realm of "how"?tone, idiom, diction, a
speech-style?to
central position among the configuration of essential first questions of
narrative voice (Genette's who, when, and from where). In his seminal
Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Seymour
Chatman promises precisely such a crucial reweighting toward a qualita
tive discussion of voice. Apparently moving away from the diegetic

category fetishism to which Genette's approach can potentially lead

(extra, intra, meta, hetero, homo), Chatman argues that it "is less
important to categorize types of narrators than to identify the features
that mark their degree of audibility" (SD196). This comes in Chatman's
extensive discussion of "Covert versus Overt Narrators" (Chapter 5),
which presents an elaborate scale of narratorial overtness ranging from
weaker markers?such as "Set Descriptions" (SD 219-22) and "Temporal
Summaries" (SD 222-25), through "Reports of What Characters Did Not
Think or Say," to what is quite reasonably proposed as the strongest
marker of "narrator prominence," "explicit self-mention" (SD 228).
What is surprising is the conspicuous absence of qualitative voice
(narratorial idiom) from this scale of "audibility." This sense of voice
would seem to belong most readily to Chatman's categories of "Ethos
and Commentary" (SD 226), at the upper end of the audibility scale.
Here too, however, the how of voice escapes attention. By "ethos"
Chatman means neither the character of the speaker (in an Aristotelian

sense) nor the character of the speaker's speech, but "verisimilitude," or
"the semblance of veracity" (SD 227), the degree to which the speaker
makes the fiction credible. There is undoubtedly a speaker "ethos" in my
examples (1), (2), and (3)?identifiable as character in (1), narrator in
(2), and a juxtaposition of the two in (3)?but it is hard to imagine that
only a question of veracity is at stake in distinguishing between them. By
Chatman understands all acts a narrator that
"commentary" speech "by
go beyond narrating, describing, identifying" or and which therefore
"resonate with overtones of propria persona" (SD 228). Insofar as it is
the overt narrator's voice more
"gratuitous," commentary "conveys
distinctly than any feature short of explicit self-mention" (SD 228).

Commentary is itself subdivided into three types: "Implicit Commen
("Ironic Narrator and Unreliable Narrator"), on the
tary" "Commentary
"Generalization"), and "Com
Story" ("Interpretation," "Judgement,"
on the Discourse" narrations," which or
mentary ("self-conscious may
may not "undercut the fabric of the fiction") (SD 219-52). The notion of
"self-conscious narration" is related to the
again directly qualitative
of narrative voice. Chatman's self-consciousness refers, however,
aspect
to narratorial comments about the discourse, rather than to those
strictly
elements of the narrator's discourse itself which, through their self
consciousness (stylistic virtuosity, convolutedness, rhetoricity, and so
forth) may draw attention to the intrusive presence of a narrator.
on one of his of self-conscious
Remarking examples commentary?from
Trollope's Barchester Towers?Chatman reflects: "This squeaky machinery

may annoy us if we are overly committed to the smoothly purring
Jamesian style" (SD 248). This opposition?between the overt narrator
of Trollope and the covert narrator of James?breaks down as soon as

one shifts the focus from what a narrator says about story or discourse to
how the narrator's discourse contributes to his prominence. James's
narratorial style, for example, frequently purrs far less smoothly than
Chatman imagines, and it is precisely where it fairly roars with lionish
pride at its own dexterity that?irrespective of "explicit self-mention"?
the narrator is at his most prominent.7 Irrespective of explicit self
mention, because it is remarkable just how unintrusive James's scattered
"I"s, "we"s, and "our friend"s in his novels are when to
actually compared
the range of other indicators of narratorial presence.8 One of the most
overt and frequent of these indicators in the late novels is the juxtaposi
tion of character and narratorial speech-styles evinced in (3) which
foregrounds (renders overt) the narrator's voice by virtue of the
unmistakable difference between the quoted voice prominent in the first
half and the quoting voice prominent in the second. A number of
further indicators of "narrator prominence" predicated on the how of
voice are also omitted from Chatman's scale. I shall continue to take my
examples from The Ambassadors: (4) "She was equipped in this particular
as Strether was the reverse, and it made an between them
opposition
which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully
suspected it" (A 60). (5) "He had had full occasion to mention him as
the other party, so oddly, to the only close personal alliance observation
had as yet detected in Chad's existence" (A 183). (6) "She spoke now as
if her art were all an innocence, and then again as if her innocence were
all an art" (A 354). Each of these examples embodies a
reflexive element
in that they all draw attention as much to the character of their own
discourse as to the world of the story. (4) is characteristic of the Jamesian
narrator's use of abstraction in The Ambassadors, which has at least two
intrusive effects. Most obviously, the complexity of the abstraction will
force the reader to pause and ponder, to interpret the relationship
between action and idea, and even to ask why the former has been
translated into the latter. In all this the reader's attention is led away
from the events of the story to a consideration of the production of the
discourse itself. Secondly, the dominant forms of this abstraction?
nominalization and nontransitive use of verbs?corroborate the sense of
a shift from action to idea and imply the intervention of a translating,
interpreting agency.9 (5) adds to the foregrounding effects of the
abstraction by introducing ambiguity of reference. This is, as has been
widely recognized,10 a characteristic feature of late Jamesian style,
temporarily interrupting the reader's logical contact with the story world
and leaving him to grapple with "recalcitrant" elements of the discourse
in order to restore meaningful contact. Again this has the effect of
highlighting the narrative voice. The overt rhetoricity of (6) draws
attention to the narratorial voice in a rather different way. Here, the

undisguised use of (narrator-bound) rhetorical figures?in this case the

striking figure of chiasmus?draws attention to the self-consciously
writerly character of the
text, foregrounding the narrator not as an
abstracting, interpreting, or communicatively subversive function, but as
manifest stylist, orator, or ethos in the Aristotelian sense of the term.
These examples represent three discrete?if in most instances overlap
ping?types of narratorial idiom which pervade the pages of The
Ambassadors. They are far from being the only types, but they are surely
the aspects of narratorial idiom which contribute most directly to what
Chatman calls "narrator or And, as
prominence" "audibility." already
suggested, their intrusive effect is greater than that of the Jamesian

narrator's occasional slippage into the first person.
Chatman's failure to include narratorial idiom (speech-style, voice) in
his sliding scale of narratorial overtness is clearly more than a technical
oversight; it is in fact reproduced by most narratological typologies and
scales which take explicit self-mention as the nonplus ultra of a narrator's
intrusiveness.11 What all these accounts fail to take into consideration is
the expressive potential of style itself; that is to say, the relation of certain
pronounced or characteristic stylistic features to a deictic center?in this
case that of a narrator. This is not to that evokes a
say style necessarily
subjective center
(there are, for example, impersonal, collective, and
but where does have an function it will
period styles), style expressive
produce a voice effect. Not only, therefore, does stylistic expressivity?
in subjectivity?have an important role to play in the
style anchored
identification of narratorial audibility, but itmust play the central role in
the characterization of a narrator's voice. Narratorial self-mention a
posits
function, and comment names a subject position, but it is only
speaker
stylistic expressivity which endows this speaking subject with a recogniz
able voice.
Narrator-bound stylistic expressivity is clearly a key characteristic of all

our Jamesian so far, as it is of James's narrative fiction as a
examples
whole. Its absence from Chatman's scale of narratorial audibility actually
informs?or at least claim that the narration
permits?his extraordinary
of The Ambassadors is strongly covert" (SD 240), a claim surely refuted by
examples (3) through (6). Here too, however, Chatman is far from
being alone, and enjoys the support of much James criticism. As early as
1921, Percy Lubbock could characterize the Jamesian narrator as
"unobtrusive to the last degree," him to a playwright "who
comparing
vanishes and leaves his people to act the story."12 More recently Donna
has claimed that in late fiction "the narrator loses
Przybylowicz James's
his privileged status as interpreter and guide for the reader?his voice
blends with that of the character and rarely intrudes,"13 while Sheila
Teahan has argued that the "foregrounding of the narrator's presence is

not only rare in James, but also defies his famous strictures against first
person narratorial intrusions."14 As Teahan's comment suggests, this
to see the Jamesian narrator as essentially nonintrusive can be
tendency
traced back to James's own critical insistence on a restriction of
"dramatic" focus to a "center of consciousness," or
single "register,"
"reflector."15 The influence to be felt in more
of this insistence is also
consciously narratological Sternberg in a splendid
studies. Thus Meir
study of quotation in narrative fiction emphasizes the way James
"preaches and reaps the benefits of getting the reader 'into the skin of
the creature' by giving that creature's vocal or mental idiom priority
over the narrator's 'poor word of honour.'"16 Similarly, in his earlier
and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, Sternberg treats
Expositional Modes
"referential ambiguity" in James exclusively as a product of the reflectoral
for Sternberg, a question of
agency.17 Referential ambiguity becomes,
narrative "gaps" caused by the central role of the Jamesian reflector in
determining the distribution of information in the text. As we have seen,
however, not all the ambiguities of the Jamesian narratorial style derive
from the reader's being continually a step behind the reflector in
accessing the relevant information of the story. Referential ambiguity is
at least as much an intrusive characteristic of the narratorial voice.
Between Narrator and Author
One of the most

challenging aspects of Chatman's Story and Discourse,
together with the later Coming to Terms, is his radical, if unfashionable,
insistence on Wayne Booth's concept of the "implied author." Chatman's
implied author is a construct, situated between the narrator and the
"real author" (as biographical or existential subject) and "reconstructed
the reader from the narrative." In contrast to the narrator, he "can tell
by
us nothing." He has "no voice, no direct means of communicating" (SD
148). Whatever one makes of the designation "implied author,"18 the
insistence that this construct should have "no voice" is, as we will see,
crucial, and the tendency of some narratologists to couple this construct

with the notion of narrative voice is at least as misleading as the
restriction of voice to time, level, and person, and the omission of
stylistic expressivity from the determining criteria of overtness.
This coupling is made with considerable energy and authority by
Susan Lanser in her The Narrative Act. Lanser's treatment of voice
(Chapter 3, "The Textual Voice") starts out from a salutary and critical
consideration of the "ontological status of narrative voice" that leads
directly to the central question of whether "terms like 'voice'" are "even
applicable to written discourse" (NA 112). For an answer that sidesteps

the ontological conundrum altogether, Lanser turns to speech act

a of which clearly has a pervasive influence on her
theory, body thought
whole project. For Lanser, speech act theory "allows us to redefine the
question of ontology in terms of the conventions of writing and reading;
the structure of inter-subjectivities created through the text is not an
abstraction, but a (conventional) pattern of linguistic use" (NA 112).
The "subjectivity" Lanser proposes to occupy the space of the originary
voice of narrative discourse?vacated by the historical author as such?
is, in her coinage, the "extrafictional voice": "The authorial voice is an
extrafictional entity whose presence accounts, for example, for organiz
ing, titling, and introducing the fictional work. This extrafictional voice,
the most direct textual counterpart for the historical author, carries all
the diegetic authority of its (publicly authorized) creator and has the
ontological status of historical truth" (NA 122). Lanser's "extrafictional

voice" turns out to have a deal in common with Chatman's
good
author." Her of "extrafictional voice" with "an autho
"implied equation
rial presence which we hold
ultimately responsible for
(NA the text"
132) is certainly compatible with Chatman's rather fuller characteriza
tion of the implied author as "the principle that invented the narrator,
along with everything else in the narrative, that stacked the cards in this
to these characters, in these
particular way, had these things happen
words or images" (SD 148). Indeed, Lanser is, in footnote, a to
prepared
concede that "the notions of 'implied author,' 'authorial voice' and
'textual voice' roughly coincide" (NA 120, n. 18). Lanser's objection to
Chatman's treatment of the "implied author" is, however, a legitimate
one: that Chatman tends to underestimate the reader's habitual (con
ventional) construction of a far more inextricable relationship between
an authorial
implied and real author. "Readers do give implied authors
weight, and the culture does give intellectual and cultural preeminence
to authors on the basis of their literary voices" (NA 132). Lanser even
goes on to claim, again with some justification, that readers will tend to
make the further between author and narrator "unless a
equation
different case is marked?signalled?by the text." Such insights are
valuable in that they question some of our theoretical anxieties about
the concept of the author. One might, indeed, go on in a similar vein to
argue that the qualifier in the notion of the "implied" author is actually
redundant, insofar as all authors, just like all subjects, are only ever
also for themselves?hence
implied entities for other subjects, and thus
Lacan 's famous claim that "a signifier represents a subject for another
If "implied" means reconstructed from signs and their organi
signifier."
zation in the text, surely we must also speak of "implied narrator" and
the difference lies in the fact that
"implied character." To suggest that
narrator and character are in the text only adds a spatial metaphor

hardly less question-begging than the metaphor of voice, but almost

certainly less productive as an analytical tool. Even to say that narrator
and character are "in the book" (which we can open and close) might be
a more acceptable ontological fabrication than that they are in the text,
which cannot be opened because it has no inside. There are, perhaps,
implications for deconstruction in such an observation: one can just as
easily argue that there is no within of the text as "il n'y a pas de hors
texte." In any case it seems quite possible to argue that if all subjects are
by definition "implied" subjects, the epithet?together with the existen
tial anxieties it embodies?may reasonably be dropped altogether.
Lanser herself, however, does not go this far down the pragmatic path,
and her concept of "extrafictional voice" remains problematic for two
reasons. First, as we have seen, the term would to have almost too
appear
many approximately synonymic cognates for its own good: "implied
author," "authorial voice," "authorial and "textual voice."
presence,"
This can, and actually does, lead to confusion. Chatman's "implied
author," crucially, "has no voice" nor can be said to enjoy a textual
It exists as a reader's reconstruction on the basis of textual
presence. only
elements to which it cannot be reduced. Thus it is hard to see
"extrafictional voice" as "the most direct textual for the
counterpart
historical author" (my emphasis). Clearly, for Lanser, extrafictional does
not mean extratextual. Does it therefore mean "real"? real voice of
(The
the historical author as his/her most direct textual counterpart?) Or
simply "outside of the fiction"? If the latter, its function in the text?as
"textual voice"?can only be markedly limited. At times, Lanser is
prepared to live with the limitations: "One of the most important aspects
of extrafictional voice is the authorial name that is presented on the title
page" (NA 126). But this limited textual presence is not conceptually
homologous with the extratextual organizing principle that informs
Lanser's broader of extrafictional voice with: "the voice
equation respon
sible for the very existence of the fictional world" (NA 123). Herein lies
the second problem with "extrafictional voice." How helpful is it to
speak of both textual entitles (like title and author's name) and
extratextual principles of organization and (implied) as
authorship
voices? What does this do to the concept of narrative voice?
These questions are best
approached through the work of a theorist
who has articulated the of narrative voice in more
question unequivo
extratextual terms. In Narrative as Communication, Didier Coste
cally
defines voice as "the product of the reader's quest for the
origin of the
text" (NC164). Employing Benveniste's famous distinction between sujet
d'?nonc? and sujet d?nonciation, Coste proposes that, for narrative utter
ances, this voice (as product) can be identified with the narrator as uthe
enunciation one or more utterances that either contain a n?rrateme
subject of of

or are involved in the production of a n?rrateme by the reader" (NC 166,
emphasis in original). The subject of the enunciation is, Coste reminds

us, "always a construction of the receiver, not the grammatical subject of
the utterance, set of utterances, or complete text concerned" (NC 167).
Coste 's immediate should make this clearer: "This is even true
example
of performative utterances such as: T swear that x happens'; the subject
of the enunciation here is not T,' subject of the enunciated verb 'swear,'
but 'he who says "I swear,"' subject of the verb 'say' in the receiver
formulated, extratextual utterance 'He says that he swears'" (NC 167).19
In one crucial sense, of course, voice is always and only identifiable with
the subject of enunciation, with the "hors texte" bracketed off by
deconstruction. But this unitary, originary voice is not homologous with
the configuration of idiomatic signals in the text which the reader
reconstructs and attributes to textual speakers or speech-styles. Voice, in
this latter sense, is of necessity a metaphorical term, and cannot be
equated with the irretrievable originary voice of the producer (author)
of a written text. Furthermore, this metaphorical sense of voice is the
sense of the term in (written) textual applications and
only meaningful
any attempt to forge a synonymity between textual and spoken voice?
that is, between vehicle and tenor, model and modelled?is by definition
self-defeating. Thus the extrafictional and extratextual "voices" identified
Lanser and Coste, while important subject positions in the
by identifying
narrative act, cannot be seen as instances of narrative voice.
effectively
The conflation of voice and subject of enunciation is a more common
than at first be imagined.20 Thus in discussing the
phenomenon might
concept of voice in Hemingway, James Phelan, while suggesting that
voice "is typically part of narrative manner, part of the how of narrative,
u
rather than the what," can on the same page argue that: thepresence of the
author's voice need not be signalled direct statements on his or her but
by any part
some device in the narrator's indeed such non
through language-?or through
linguistic clues as the structure of the action?for conveying a discrepancy in

values between author and narrator" in one
(emphasis original).21 Again,
wonders what kind of voice it is that can be "present" in a written text
without the help of linguistic clues (or signs).
It is perhaps worth offering one more example of this type of
conflation as it comes from the most sophisticated of narratological
In The Fictions and the Languages a
quarters. of Language of Fiction,
landmark in the study of the narrative representation of speech and
consciousness, Monika Fludernik takes issue with the "dual voice"
which claims to identify two voices?that of narrator and
hypothesis,
that of character?in free indirect discourse.22 While denying that the
actual words of a free indirect discourse utterance can necessarily be
attributed to two discrete voices, Fludernik does concede that "dual

voice can indeed by posited to exist on a higher level" (FL 440, emphasis
in original). She goes on: "The double-levelled 'intention' of the
discourse in ironic passages, in fact, is not a purely linguistic phenom
enon but can be explained as the result of interpretative work brought
to bear on the juxtaposition between the wording of the text and the (by
implication incompatible) cultural or textual norms of the text as
constructed by the reader or implied as values shared by the reader and
the realistic text world" (FL 440). While we clearly have another instance
here of an extralinguistic projection of voice, Fludernik's immediate
example of Emma's "mirror reflections on herself in love" in Madame
so cited for double yet whose
Bovary?"passages frequently voicing,"
language is "clearly the narrator's"?serves to qualify any unproblematic
collapsing of voice into extratextual, reconstructed subject (FL 440).
Indeed, the enormous value of the concept of the subject of enunciation
is that it enables us to make a vital and workable distinction between a
voiceless, textually irretrievable,
theoretically reconstructible,
yet orga
nizing, arranging, juxtaposing subject and the subjects who speak within
the text?and may also do their share of organizing, arranging, and
juxtaposing?as enunciated, textual voice. And Fludernik is quite right to
see the play between these two subjects and their respective perspectives
as one central condition for textual irony.23 This is not to say that a
narrator?as a textually locatable be responsible for
subject?cannot
ironic effects. It is only that these are the effects of "silent" organization,
rather than of a narrative "voice."
speaking
Voice and Context in Free Indirect Discourse
One area of narrative in which questions of voice are very much to the
fore is the representation of speech and thought, and above all free
indirect discourse (FID). Much has been written on FID in the last
years, and there is no need to rehearse the of that
twenty-five arguments
massive literature here, especially when much of the literature itself is
concerned with its own retrospective.24 Instead I should like to start out
from two fundamental conclusions which seem to have been established
with broad agreement, and which are especially relevant to any attempt
to forge a workable concept of narrative voice: (1) that FID, though
grammatically analyzable is above all contextually identifiable, and
(2) that FID is not a "transformational" that can be
phenomenon
linguistically derived from direct discourse according to a series of
rules.
generative
First, most accounts would now seem to agree that FID can be
grammatically marked, but is not in any final sense grammatically

identifiable. That is to say the linguistic definition of FID is accurate but

not sufficient. Thus, "She loved him," may be read as a free indirect
rendition of a projected direct statement ("T love him/you,' she said"),
obeying identifiable grammatical shifts in the direction of narrative
tense and person, or it may be read as a descriptive narratorial
statement. For this reason, it is also generally agreed, the phenomenon
of FID is ultimately a construction of the reader working on the basis of
contextual cues.25
The
significance of context in establishing FID for dual voice theories
is potentially much greater than has been generally realized. Precisely
one of the weaknesses of the dual voice approach to FID has been its
insistence on the of the narrator's voice within the
necessary presence
free indirect utterance.26 Once one that the narratorial
accepts gram
matical markers of FID (shifts in tense and person) are not necessary
constituents of all FID utterances,27 this position clearly becomes unten
able. However, if one allows that FID is contextually constructed?that
context is an constituent of FID as a marked utterance28?
integral vocally
dual voice can nevertheless be posited at a level beyond the free indirect
utterance itself. FID is then constituted in the perceived difference of
voice in the FID utterance from the voice of the broader utterance in
which it is embedded. Voice?of any kind?can only be perceived as
"voice-different-from"; where the difference, and thus the identity, is not
foregrounded through a represented comparison, it is either not per
ceived as distinctive voice, or a comparison is assumed (with the voice of
other texts or the narrators of other authors). Where the difference is
in in cases of free indirect discourse?
foregrounded comparison?as
the reader is made aware of the of an identifiable narrative
presence
voice precisely by the momentary (embedded, framed) deviation from
it.
Traditional discussions of FID tended to be based on a "tripartite

schema" (FL 280) in which FID is situated "between" indirect and direct
discourse. In this tripartite schema direct discourse generally occupies a
position as the primary/originary root or source
particularly privileged
of all indirect and free indirect transformations of an original speech
act. While this is a helpful model for identifying FID on the basis of its
difference from indirect and direct discourse?a difference, in the latter
case, defined in terms of conjectured transformations it performs on a
act?it nonetheless relies on a number of
conjectured speech question
able assumptions. First, a FID utterance, itself only identifiable as an
effect of context, does not on another utterance
perform any operations
at all. The route back
(or beyond?) a direct utterance
to and the
this involves are carried out by a
pseudotransformational operations
reader in the construction of a still further context not supplied by the

text itself. Secondly, there is no reason to imagine that all FID utterances
are based on actual acts of speech or thought. In fiction they can often
distort a putative speech act, or "represent" words which have not been
spoken at all.29 Thirdly, there is no reason to suppose that the conjec
tured speech act "represented" in FID can be retrieved. Not only are
certain aspects of speech?intonation, dialect, the "grain" of the voice,
and so forth?unrepresentable in writing, but direct discourse, indirect
discourse, and free indirect discourse are not "derivable" in the genera
tive sense because in fact no transformations from an assignable deep
structure take
place.30
In spite of these reservations, direct discourse seems to have remained
for most accounts of speech and thought representation in narrative
discourse a kind of yardstick or mimetic bottom line. Most of the sliding
scale models of FID31?while considerably more sophisticated than the
earlier tripartite models?continue either to start out from or head
toward direct discourse as a paradigmatic form of verbal mimesis. In all
these models FID continues to occupy the?albeit somewhat more
densely populated?middle ground between direct and indirect discourse.
It might be more productive at this stage in the FID argument to
approach FID from the other end of the diege tic-mime tic scale. That is,
instead of seeing FID from the point of view of the represented speech
it embodies, to begin from the representing instance: to consider FID as
a form of and to analyze it in terms of its relation to the
quotation
quoting instance. Here the point of comparison would become distance
not from some putative?but ultimately absent and irretrievable?
character-utterance, but from a and
given textually present narrating
and quoting instance. Furthermore, the phenomenon of FID could then
be resituated within a broader spectrum of quotational or combined
discourse phenomena and characterized through its relationship to
these phenomena, rather than in its conjectured relation to putative acts
of speech. Such a spectrum would include such categories as
"Ansteckung
and "reflectorization" (Stanzel), and "immersion"
"appropriation"
(Fludernik), and "pseudo-objective underpinning" and "hidden po
lemic" (Bakhtin), while clearly also overlapping with broader stylistic
such as and
phenomena stylization, parody, irony.
If such an approach avoids the pitfalls of the direct discourse
fallacy, it
may well be seen to introduce fallacies of its own. While it can be argued
that, in relating a FID utterance to the context in which it is framed, a
quotational approach bases itself upon two textually identifiable units of
discourse (where the putative direct discourse utterance can only be
reconstructed from airy nothing), one is left with the difficult
question
of the status of this framing instance or voice. Granted that quotation, to
be recognizable as such, requires the positing of a quoting instance as

well as a quoted utterance, to what degree is this quoting instance

textually retrievable, what is its ontological status in the textual world,
and need it be the source of all utterances in the text? These are all
questions that have been raised by critics of the dual voice theory, and
questions that cannot fully be answered (only rendered unaskable) in
purely linguistic terms. Before examining them in more detail, it will be
useful to consider one self-avowedly metalinguistic to dual
approach
voice in the dialogic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin.32
Linguistic and Metalinguistic Voices
The significance for the study of narrative voice of Bakhtin's dialogic

approach to language in general and the novel in particular is consider
able. The implications of his treatment of discourse as dialogue and
quotation, stratified with the registers and genres of heteroglossia, have
yet to be fully digested by narratology. Here I shall only be concerned
with one primarily methodological aspect of his work which is particu
larly pertinent to the present context: the notion of double-voiced
discourse as developed in the fifth chapter of Problems of Dostoevsky s
Poetics.
Bakhtin defines double-voiced discourse as "discourse with an orienta

tion towards another's discourse" where "the author . . .
(PD 199),
make[s] use of someone else's discourse for his own purposes, by
inserting a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has,
and which retains an intention of its own .... In one two
discourse,
semantic intentions appear, two voices" (PD 189). Double-voiced dis
course is itself analyzable in terms of three "varieties": "unidirectional,"
"vari-directional," and "active." Unidirectional double-voiced discourse
"an intention on the of the author to make use of
represents part
someone else's discourse in the direction if its [that is, that discourse's]
own particular aspirations" (PD 193). Here Bakhtin's central example is
"stylization" which "stylizes another's style in the direction of that style's
own particular tasks" (PD 193). In "vari-directional double-voiced dis
course," on the other hand, the voice another's
speaking occupying
discourse deliberately misbehaves with the intended
direction semantic
of that discourse. Here Bakhtin's key example is parody, where, "as in
stylization the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in
contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic
intention that is directly opposed to the original one" (PD 193). In both
these varieties, the discourse of the other plays a passive role: it is
tampered with rather than tampering. In Bakhtin's third variety of
double-voiced discourse, it is the discourse of the other which is active.

"Another's discourse ... is not with a new intention, but it

reproduced
acts upon, influences, and in one way or another determines the
author's discourse, while itself remaining outside it" (PD 195). This third
variety Bakhtin calls "the active type (reflected discourse of another)"
(PD 199), and his central
example is "hidden polemic": "In a hidden
polemic the author's discourse is directed towards its own referential
object, as in any other discourse, but at the same time every statement
about the object is constructed in such a way that, apart from its
referential meaning, a polemical blow is struck at the other's discourse
on the same theme, at the other's statement about the same
object"
(PD195).
The first two sentences of James's What Maisie Knew will serve to
illustrate the effectiveness of Bakhtin's typology as a reading strategy:
"(7) The litigation had seemed interminable and had in fact been
complicated; but by the decision on the the judgement of the
appeal
divorce-court was confirmed as to the assignment of the child. The
father, who, though bespattered from head to foot, had made good his
case, was, in pursuance of this triumph, appointed to keep her: itwas not
so much that the mother's character had been more absolutely damaged
as that the brilliancy of a lady's complexion (and this lady's, in court, was
immensely remarked) might be more regarded as showing the spots."33
In an excellent discussion of the opening pages of What Maisie Knew,
Mary Galbraith has drawn attention to the significance of Bakhtinian
heteroglossia in the prologue which precedes the first chapter of the
novel, identifying a combination of "the languages of law, journalism,
gossip, moral rectitude, and literary wit."34 In the second sentence
quoted above, she also describes the archaic "bespattered" as an
imitation of "high epic style" with "made good" and "triumph" further
to a
contributing "language of conquest" (198). This stands in direct
contrast to the highly formal and consciously
"objective" legal language
of the first sentence. One might, however, take a Bakhtinian reading of
the sentences one stage further by describing the legal discourse of the
first as a form of unidirectional stylization (a speaker using legal style in
the way one might expect it to be used), with the epic echoes in the
second fulfilling a vari-directional, function, in that their
parodie
intention is anything but the heroic celebration of epic. While there is
nothing "intentionally" parodie about the mere terms "bespattered" and
"triumph," the reader is soon led to the (re) construction of such an
intention by what s/he learns of the distinctly unheroic character of
Maisie's father, Beale Farange. That pseudo-epic language is used
being
vari-directionally is also suggested by the incongruity of its
juxtaposition
with the continuing legal terminology in the second sentence ("The
father," "case," and Indeed the full
"pursuance,"35 "appointed"). comedy

of the construction depends on the reader's recognition of the incon

gruity in the relationship of a quoted utterance both to its object (heroic
language referred to the unheroic Beale Farange) and to the other
(quoted) utterances in which it is embedded (the language of the
court). The field of quotation is further extended in the second half of
the second sentence. Here the verbs "remarked" and
perspectival
not
only introduce a new
angle of focalization (that of
"regarded"
whoever does the remarking and regarding), but also alert us to the
incorporation of "another's speech in another's language" in the
utterance. The use of the indirect article in "a lady's complexion"
suggests that we are dealing with a (quoted) common view, rather than
a narratorial of the lady in The semantic
just description question.
overkill of "absolutely" and "immensely" seems to reproduce, with comic
effect, the somewhat histrionic language of the inquisitive social group
attending the litigation.36 In contrast to the epic overtones of "bespat
tered," the metaphorically homologous "showing the spots" seems again
to more to the voice of this same common view. As
belong readily
Galbraith points out, the social discourses quoted by the text proliferate
throughout the rest of the prologue. Ranging from the incorporation of
moral cliches like "a happy example to youth and innocence" to the
implicit parody of newspaper appeals for "the rescue of the little one"
and for "the idea that some movement should be started, some
benevolent person should come forward," the quotation of a diversity of
socially stratified styles of speech serves to implicate (or rather to self
incriminate) society as a whole in the tragic fate of the little girl.
This kind of reading raises some interesting questions for the concept
of narrative voice in general. In identifying such a polyphony of quoted
discourses, how can one continue to speak of an identifiable narratorial
idiom? What sense does it make to attribute to a narratorial voice
single
utterances as diverse
as: (8) "[Miss Overmore] could say lots of dates
straight off (letting you hold the book yourself) state the position of
Malabar, play six pieces without notes and, in a sketch, put in beautifully
the trees and houses and difficult parts" (WM50), and (9) "Itmust not
be supposed that her ladyship's intermissions were not qualified by
demonstrations of another entries and breathless
order?triumphal
pauses during which she seemed to take of everything in the room ... a
survey that was rich in intentions" (
WM88). Or, to phrase the question
from the how are we as readers nonetheless able to
opposite angle, open
a book like What Maisie Knew at almost any page and immediately
identify a familiar narrator (whose familiarity, indeed, is sustained over
several works of fiction)? Bakhtin can help us in two ways here. While
insisting on the influence of heteroglossia on all speech, Bakhtin singles

out the novel as the artistic genre in which "words that are already

populated with the social intentions of others" are compelled to "serve a

second master," to refract the intentions of the "artist" himself. In the
novel, "diversity of voices and heteroglossia" are organized by the writing
subject "into a structured artistic system."37 The novel is "a diversity of
social speech types . . . artistically organized" (DAT262). Narrative voice,
like any other voice, is a fundamentally composite entity: a specific
configuration of voices. But it is, nonetheless, actively configured, and it is
precisely in the traces of its (artistic) organization that its identity
resides. One familiar aspect of Jamesian narratorial organization, the
ubiquitous use of parenthesis, is even locatable in both (8) and (9).
Another, perhaps more central, organizational "principle" which per
vades the whole text and concept of What Maisie Knew is already
identifiable?in true Jamesian fashion?in the novel's opening clause:
"The litigation had seemed interminable and had in fact been compli
cated." This rhetorical parison is not only textually reproduced through
out the novel, but introduces the novels' key structural and thematic
concerns: an almost absurd symmetry of conflicting relations (with
Maisie projected like a shuttle-cock or billiard ball between) and the
poor child's protracted lesson in distinguishing between what the words
of others "seem" to mean and what is "in fact" being implied.38
At least part of Bakhtin's significance for the study of voice, then, lies
in his treatment of narrative discourse as an form
essentially quotational
where the quoting instance is not unitary and monological, but a
configuration of different voices or expressive styles organized into an
"artistic" whole by means of a set of identifiable rhetorical principles.
The ontological status of this configured instance remains,
quoting
however, unclear. On the basis of Bakhtin's general theoretical state
ments on the dialogic nature of all discourse, where the hearer or
recipient is afforded a crucial role in the construction of meaning,39 one
would want to construe this notion of voice
surely composite pragmati
cally as a construction of the reader?albeit engaged in a dialogue with
identifiable textual signals of stylistic expressivity. In his actual analyses
of narrative discourse, however, Bakhtin tends to be more
one-sidedly
production oriented, focusing on what he calls the text's discursive
"tasks" and "intentions," which he attributes to the author.40 It
ultimately
is true thatin "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel"
(1937-38) Bakhtin distinguishes between the author as biographical
subject and as an image the reader reconstructs from the text (a
distinction along the lines of that between "implied" and "real" author),
and in the same essay he seems to corroborate Genette's notion of all
narrators being necessarily "extradiegetic" in relation to the events they
themselves narrate: "I as the teller (or writer) of this event am
already
outside the space and time in which the event occurred."41 This

conflation of teller and writer, however, is only rendered more problem

atic in his discussionof discursive polyphony in Problems of Dostoevsky's
Poetics, where Bakhtin continues to speak of the "author's voice" in the
text. At one point, indeed, it seems as if Bakhtin would agree with those
who see the narrator as no more than an feature
narratologists optional
of a narrative text.
In his discussion of "unidirectional double-voiced
discourse," for example, Bakhtin includes the category of "narrated
story," arguing that a "narrator's narration, refracting in itself the
author's intention, does not swerve from its own straight path and is
sustained in tones and intonations truly characteristic of it" (PD 193).
Thus "narrated story" appears to be one type of (double-voiced)
novelistic discourse among the likes of stylization, parody, and hidden
can for Bakhtin, of course, also be vari-directional
polemic.42 Narration
(for example, "parodistic narration"), where the voice of the (implied)
author is directly at odds with that of the narrator. This would seem to be
roughly analogous to the notion of "unreliable narration" in narratology.
In principle, however, itwould still appear that the author is able to work
without a narrating voice additional to his own, which continues?in
both uni- and vari-directional forms?to be an identifiable entity in the
text.
It is therefore interesting that one of the most coherent and sustained

to dual voice theory has come from a study which offers some
challenges
of the most for the narrator" or "narrator
persuasive arguments "optional
less narrative," Ann Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences. This is not the place
to offer a critical assessment of Banfield's original and rigorous linguistic
argument, itself over a series of influential articles published
developed
throughout the 1970s.43 The aspect of Banfield's work that I should like
to explore here is her explicit rejection of dual voice theory.
This rejection is informed above all by two principles. The first is
related to the claim, central to Banfield's argument in Unspeakable
that for in any one sentence there can be "at
Sentences, any expression
most one referent, called the 'subject of consciousness' or SELF to
whom all expressive elements are attributed" (US93). To this claim she
gives the formula "1 E/l SELF." The second antidualist principle
concerns the status of the narrator, a term Banfield reserves for
sentences of narration a first-person

with subject. Where there is no "I"
in the text?outside, that is, instances of direct speech?there is no
narrator. Third-person or heterodiegetic) narratives are thus by
(figurai
definition "narratorless." Banfield expresses this thesis formulaically as:
"1 TEXT/1 SPEAKER," where SPEAKER is defined as the "unique
referent" of a text's first-person pronoun (if it has one) (17S57).44 The
relevance of this reasoning for dual voice theory should be clear. If a text
can have only one SPEAKER, its "voice" must either be that of a (figurai)

SELF, or that of a first-person narrator; both cannot speak in the same
expression.
Among the examples Banfield uses to defend the first formula against
dual voice theory are, fittingly for our purposes, the following sentences
from What Maisie Knew: (10) "It hadn't been put to her, and she couldn't
or at any rate didn't, put it to herself, that she liked Miss Overmore
better than she liked papa; but it would have sustained her under such
an imputation to feel herself able to reply that papa too liked Miss
Overmore exactly as much. He had particularly told her so" (US 186;
in Banfield then cites Dorrit Cohn's comment on
emphasis original).
these sentences as representative of the dual voice position: "The point
of view is clearly Maisie's but the language is elaborately Jamesian; with
the single exception of the word not a single phrase corresponds
'papa'
to the child's idiom."45 What is particularly revealing about Banfield's
is that, in "whether such sentences constitute counter
response asking
evidence 1 E/l to
SELF," she observations solely to
restricts her
questions of "point of view" and altogether ignores the crucial distinc
tion between point of view and "language" implied by Cohn. "The
or weakness of the dual voice's Banfield
strength counter-argument,"
claims, "lies in the linguistic meaning given the notion of point of view"
(US 188). In Banfield's own theory "point of view is redefined as SELF,"
and its presence "attested to by precise grammatical elements" (US 188).
Banfield readily concedes that her example from What Maisie Knew
contains "grammatical evidence of a third person SELF" in the expres
sive element which functions to the character's
"papa," "represent point
of view" (US 188-89). But, Banfield goes on to ask, "what grammatical
evidence of a narrator's point of view do we find? This is what is
problematic in the dual voice claim" (US 189). In fact, this is not part of
the dual voice claim at all. Cohn is not arguing for two points of view in
this excerpt, but for two distinct voices: one idiom suggested by the
childlike "papa" and another suggested by the more sophisticated
of "sustained" and Banfield appears here
language "imputation."
uncritically to collapse language and point of view, voice and focaliza

tion?questions of who speaks and who sees?in precisely the way
criticized, classically, by Genette a decade earlier in Discours du r?cit.46
Even if one is prepared to ignore the category mistake here (an
about focalization as an about the
argument posing argument voice),
1 E/l SELF where SELF is a redefinition
formula, of point of view,
remains problematic in connection with utterances like (10). Bakhtin
would surely want to argue that there are two points of view or
"intentions" here, with the "author" intentionally speaking "in someone
term
else's discourse." The "papa" has its own object in Maisie's
discourse, but is also itself an object of the sophisticated discourse in

which it is embedded. For Maisie "papa" is a "direct and unmediated"

designation of her father. For the adult discourse which quotes "papa,"
it is also a signifier of the speech of a child. Indeed its function is not
only to "name" Beale Farange, but at once to evoke childlike discourse?
an evocation whichrepresentcannot
the point of view of the child.
One further example will clarify this while continuing to question the
value of Banfield's 1 E/l SELF. Here is the immediate continuation of
example (9): (11) "Maisie could play more pieces than Mrs Wix, who
was moreover visibly ashamed of her houses and trees and could only,
with the help of a smutty forefinger, of doubtful legitimacy in the field of
art, do the smoke coming out of the chimneys" (WM 50-51). Here again
one could begin by saying that the focalization isMaisie's (it is her view
of Mrs. Wix), while the language of the excerpt seems to combine the
voices of adult ("doubtful legitimacy") and child ("do the smoke"). That
is to say, the point of view of a single SELF is expressed in terms that both
imitate and contrast with Maisie's own. Bakhtin, however, might further
that other are also into this sentence. Not
argue viewpoints incorporated
only is there a contrast between the language of adult and child, but also
between various types of adult speech. The phrases "doubtful legiti
and "field of art" to a or scholarly discourse
macy" belong professional
whose "tasks" could quite presumably include the description of a range
of techniques of draftsmanship, among which, however, the "smutty
technique would surely be unlikely to figure. Thus, the
forefinger"
of this discourse constitutes a form of misappropriation for
quotation
openly parodie purposes.
Banfield's other implicit objection to dual voice theory is perhaps still
more fundamental. Certainly, as we have seen, Bakhtin himself remains
unclear about the categories of author and narrator and their ontologi
cal status in the world of the text. And yet it is undeniable that Bakhtin
relies upon an identifiable, organizing authorial and intentional "voice"
which to chart the directions in which other voices are appropri
against
ated in the discourse of the novel. With the important exception of the
first-person narrator, Banfield is deeply skeptical of all such originary
and unifying agents, whatever their terminological designation. She
sees, with some justification, the concept of the (heterodiegetic) narra
tor as an attempt to sneak the discredited notion of the author back into
narrative through the rear door (US 183). She then dismisses the idea of
the narrator as of the text's or as "the locus
"away conceptualizing unity"
of the text's meaning." To see the narrator as "responsible for all the
sentences of the text," as "the creator of the text's and
style organiza
tion" is to fall back into the very communication model Banfield sets out
to refute. Defined independently of communication, narrative fiction is
"linguistically constituted by two mutually exclusive kinds of sentences,

optionally narratorless sentences

of pure narration and sentences of
represented speech thought" and
(US 185). Both these sentences
Banfield describes as "unspeakable," meaning that they do not conform
to the speaker/addressee relations of communication. Thus, just as
Banfield defines the second kind of sentences "noncommunicatively" as
"expression," so sentences of narration are defined as those "which may
or may not contain a SPEAKER, but which [have] no ADDRESSEE/
HEARER, no PRESENT, and no HERE or NOW" (US 171). From this,
Banfield argues, it also follows that "a SPEAKER with no ADDRESSEE/
HEARER is a narrator" (US 171), and it is precisely the absence of a
"you"?for Banfield the most fundamental requirement of the commu
nicative act?which distinguishes sentences of narration from communi
cation. Taken together these statements should imply that the appear
ance of the first person in a narrative (outside of direct discourse, and
where there is no addressee) will refer to the presence of a homodiegetic
narrator,47 while the appearance of the second person will indicate an
act of communication. In fact, it is not hard to find examples which
confound such an implication. Consider the following sentences from
James's The Golden Bowl: (12) "So much mute communication was
doubtless all this time marvellous, and we may confess to having perhaps
read into the scene, prematurely, a critical character that took longer to
(13). "So far as this was the case the impression of course
develop"48
could only be lost on a mere vague Italian; itwas one of those for which
you had to be, blessedly, an American?as indeed you had to be,
blessedly, an American for all sorts of things: so long as you hadn't,
blessedly not, or
to remain in America" (GB 102-3). Is there an
addressee in (12), and, if not, does the "we" of (12) really refer to a
homodiegetic narrator? And is this narrator really narrating49 at all here,
or rather at an on the antinomies of
commenting, extradiegetic level,
his own narration? If so, must not these comments?to be as
recognized
comments, and distinguished from Banfield's "narration"?be under
stood as a communication addressed to a narratee, while the in
"you"s
(13) could quite reasonably be taken as invocations of a general human
subject, rather than the specific addressee of a communicative act?50
And are we to assume that when the first- and
finally, second-person
pronouns retreat from the text in the sentences which surround these
the narrative ceases to be a narrative and an act of
examples, first-person
communication? According to this logic, most of James's reflector
narratives would run the of Banfield's narrative and
gamut expressive,
communicative functions, being first-person narratives with a narrator
in one sentence, narratorless reported speech and thought in another,
and non-narrative acts of communication in another.
yet
These problems would seem to be inherent in Banfield's of
project

one crucial thing Banfield's

analyzing narrative in terms of sentences. The
model seems unable to do is account for how the sentences of narrative
come to form a whole. In attempting to avoid positing a
together
unifying or organizing agent in narrative, Banfield actually undermines
the status of narrative as a textual unit.51
ontological
Narratorless Narrative and Non-Narrating Narrators
It is clear
that Bakhtin's definition of the novel as "a diversity of social
. . . and a of individual voices,
speech types diversity artistically
assumes an intentional, organizing agent, finally responsible
arranged"52
for the unity and integrity of the text. It is equally clear that his
identification of this agent with the "author" or the "prose writer"
remains, in the light of broadly accepted insistence on the
narratology's
absence of the author from the text, insufficient as a textually identifi
able (or text immanent) source of textual integrity. Banfield, as we have
seen, treats the allocation of such agency to the narrator as little more
than the return of the author in pseudotechnical garb, and insists that
the unity of the text "must be held together by some other hypothesis
than that of the narrator's voice" (US 222). Her own approach?the
division of "the sentences of narrative into those with a subject and those
without" (US 11)?while highly restricted rules according to
generating
which some sentences are by definition "narratorless," does not (be
cause it cannot) provide an alternative hypothesis for the text's unity.
In this section Iwould like to float some final thoughts on the role of
the narrator by means of one last look at the arguments for the
of "narratorless narrative." Here I turn my attention to some
possibility
of the concluding remarks of Fludernik's The Fictions of Language and the
Fiction. As they come at the end of not only a critical
Languages of
discussion of Banfield, but also the largest collection of data concerning
the representation of speech and thought in narrative that we are likely
to see assembled for a long time, they are clearly of particular significance.53
In her concluding Fludernik comes down in support of the
chapter,
idea that "there can be narration without a narrator" (FL 443). This
would be the case in reflector mode narrative," as
"pure although,
Fludernik to concede,
is quick "purity is an idealized concept, and actual
narratives of
reflector mode
the frequently contain digressions into
evaluation of the narrative that must then be aligned
(usually) disguised
with a 'covert' narrative voice" (FL 443). Even with this more moderate
version of the "optional narrator" argument there are problems. First, it
is not hard to find reflector mode narratives where the narrator's voice
is overtly identifiable without evaluative digression. Examples (3) to (6)

from The Ambassadors?a text widely cited as a paradigm of the reflector

mode54?are a case in point. Secondly, while all of these examples
a narrative voice distinct from the idiom of the reflector
foreground
whose observations they describe, none of them meets the conditions
under which Fludernik is prepared to speak of a "narrator": "I reserve
the term narrator for those instances of subjective language that imply a
the pronoun 7, addresses to the narratee,
speaking subject: personal
meta-narrative commentary (frequently in conjunction with 7, you, and
we) and explicit commentary and evaluation" (FL 443) .55 Thirdly,
Fludernik's criteria for a narrator are not only too limited?in
positing
that they ignore the central contribution of rhetorical and stylistic
features in narratorial also too weak. Metanarrative
evoking presence?but
commentary may appear to be the key indicator of narratorial presence
in example (12), but even here the characteristic use of parenthesis is
also a contributing feature. Indeed, in the following sentence from The
Golden Bowl, syntax?expressive of a highly reflexive, self-qualifying act
of speech?it surely a stronger marker of narratorial overtness than the
supposedly decisive intrusion of the first-person pronoun: (14) "And
while, moreover, to begin with, he still but held his vision in place,
steadying it fairly with his hands, as he had often steadied, for inspec
tion, a precarious old pot or kept a glazed picture in its right relation to
the light, the other, the outer presumptions in his favour, those
independent of what he might himself contribute and that therefore, till
he should "speak," remain necessarily vague?that quantity, I say, struck
him as positively multiplying, as putting on, in the fresh Brighton air and
on the sunny Brighton front, a kind of tempting palpability" (GB 188).
Surely it is the voice of this sentence which links it to a subjective
"instance" or "speaker," and this subjectivity would not be erased merely
by the omission of the "I say."56 It is precisely this qualitative and
expressive sense of a distinctive voice which allows us to entertain, with
Genette, the possibility of the personal pronoun /intervening in the text
at any point. In fact Genette goes considerably further than this: "Insofar
as the narrator can at any instant intervene as such in the narrative, every
narrating is, by definition, to all intents and purposes presented in the

first person" (ND 144). Here he is supported by speech act theory, at
least as represented by Paul Ricoeur in Oneself as Another, where it is
argued that the pronominal "prefix of explicit performatives [is] the
model for the linguistic expression of the illocutionary force of all
statements" insofar as "it is not statements that refer to something but the
speakers themselves who refer in this way" (emphasis in original).57 Whatever
one makes of such an argument, the overestimation of the first-person
pronoun as the marker of narratorial presence is clearly
paradigmatic
unhelpful in the identification and characterization of narrative voice.

"I"?as Wittgenstein repeatedly reminds us58?identifies only a speaker

function and not a particular speaker (all speakers are "I"s), whereas
"voice" must, if it is to deserve the designation, signify a far more
distinctive corpus of subjectivity effects.
The same weakness of definition also applies to Fludernik's other
criteria for the determination of narratorial presence. One final ex
ample from The Golden Bowl?this time an example of two metanarrative
comments embedded in a discursive environment somewhere between
internal focalization and psychonarration?will have to suffice here.
(15) Itmay immediately be mentioned that this amiable man bethought himself
in general, it might to him
of his personal advantage, only when appear that
other those of other persons, had put in their claim. It
advantages, successfully
be mentioned also that he other was the law
may always figured persons?such
of his nature?as a numerous array, and that, conscious of but a
though single
near tie, one affection, one
duty deepest-rooted
in his life, it had never, for many
minutes been his not to feel himself surrounded and commit
together, portion
ted, never been his refreshment to make out where the many-coloured
quite
human of tint, concentric zones
appeal, represented by gradations diminishing
of of faded to the blessed whiteness for
intensity, importunity, really impersonal
which his vision sometimes ached. It shaded off, the appeal?he would have
admitted that; but he had as yet noted no at which it
point positively stopped.
(GB 129-30)
Not only are the two narratorial comments beginning each sentence?
themselves passive formulations of first-person intrusions?lexically less
striking in their distance from the idiom of Adam Verver (the reflector
here) than such expressions as "diminishing concentric zones of inten
sity," they also

seem to fit the anaphoric pattern of the extract as a
whole.59 That is to narratorial overtness is here, once at least
say, again,
as much?if not more?an effect of lexis, and rhetoric, as of
syntax,
deixis and metanarrative comment.
pronominal
My fourth problem with Fludernik's defense of the "optional narra
tor" thesis concerns another aspect of the definition of the narrator on
which it rests. Substantiating her claim that "there can be narration
without a narrator," Fludernik writes: "That is to say, in pure reflector
mode narrative there cannot be any indication of a narrative voice" (FL
443). This is surely to conflate narrator (as function) and narrative voice
(as effect). A text either has a narrator or it hasn't, but voice is a relative
category: it can be more or less strongly detectable. If narrative voice is
the (effective) means of identifying the narrator function as such, the two
must necessarily be held as discrete. An example should make this clear.
Three of James Joyce's Dubliners stories have a first-person narrator
("The Sisters," "An Encounter," and "Araby"). However, the narratorial

idiom of "Araby," for example, is not markedly different from that of

"Eveline," narrated in the third person (and thus, for Banfield at least,
necessarily "narratorless"). There is, on the other hand, a much more
striking difference of narratorial idiom between "Eveline" and, say, the

"Eumaeus" episode of Ulysses, which also has no first-person narrator. To
object here that narratorial idiom is something quite different from
narrative voice is to leave the latter concept devoid of any definition
other than the tautological statement: narrative voice equals the narra
tor. In this case "Araby" and the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses would have
the same narrative voice, while "Eveline" and "Eumaeus" have no
narrative voice at all.
To differentiate between narrator as function and voice as effect is

not, itmust be conceded, even to begin to address the problem of what
a narrator actually is or does. My final quibble with Fludernik's restricted
use of the term, although only a rather obvious one, will
terminological
force us to face this problem head on. If, for Fludernik, the one thing a
narrator does not do is narrate, retain the term "narrator" at all?
why Why
not the of metanarrative comments as a "commentator,"
identify subject
and the subject of extradiegetic evaluation as?perish the thought?an
"evaluator," each as a distinct and "instance" or
treating separate
subjective entity? Alternatively commonsensically one

(with can insist
Genette) that the primary activity of a narrator is to narrate, with
commenting and interpreting subsumed under, or as adjacent to, this
function.60 Even the most covert narrators comment on and
implicitly
interpret the stories they narrate in their very selection and ordering of
events.
Proponents of the "narratorless narrative" theory would no doubt

deny these functions to the narrator, who is not, as Banfield argues?at
least with reference to narrative?the or
"third-person" organizing agent
source of the text's unity. Nonlinguistic
attempts this source to locate
outside of the narrator generally resort
to one or another variant of the
concept of the implied author. Thus Brian McHale, in a very convincing
review of Banfield's Unspeakable Sentences, admits that it had been "quite
incorrect" of him in a
article to of the narrator "as
previous speak
and
guarantor of because "the narrator
organizer meaningfulness"61
narrates, it is the authorwho and
organizes guarantees meaningfulness?
or, I would to say, a constructed a or
prefer author-figure, surrogate
'implied' in any case, a construct
author; functionally distinct from the
narrator" (US 22). Similarly, David Hayman, seeking to differentiate
between a personally identifiable storyteller in Ulysses and an impersonal
organizer of textual elements, coins the term "arranger," defining this
agency as "something between a persona and a function, somewhere
between the narrator and the implied author."62 The question begged by

both of these formulations is how a narrator can possibly narrate without

arranging or organizing; or, what remains of narrating when it is
deprived of its organizing and arranging function? Organization and

arrangement are surely integral to the act of narrating itself, and a
narrator who does neither (because both are already done for him) is
relocated at?or relegated to?the other end of the narrative act with
the reader, but without even the active, interpretative privileges the
reader enjoys. Arguments against the arranging function of the narrator
inevitably cite texts which consist (almost) exclusively of direct speech?

such as Seymour Chatman's "Pure Speech Records" which presuppose a
rather than a narrator (SD 175). Thus Manfred Jahn in
"stenographer"
another searching review of Unspeakable Sentences, without accepting the
"narratorless narrative" thesis for all narratives, offers the
third-person
or the person who transcribed
hypothetical example of "a tape recorder,
a taped event and mechanically added speaker identifications" to show
that an arranger need not "be the key to the text's integrity."63 The
here is that everything depends on whether the transcriber is
problem
understood to select the material transcribed (or taped). For selection is
one crucial key to the integrity of a text?and one only has
undoubtedly
to think of historiographical narratives to be reminded of what a central
part it plays in structuring the text's significance. And how, in narrative
fiction, are we to the from the selection of
separate transcription
presented discourse? If all the "sentences of narrative" are in some sense

selected sentences, it becomes very difficult to conceive of a narrated
discourse without a "selector"; and if narration, as a process, is itself
without selection, there seems to be little reason for banish
impossible
the narrator from narratives.64
ing third-person
The issue here is at least partly terminological. If one chooses to
restrict the term "narrator" to an identifiable teller persona, then there
are narratorless narratives. This does not, however, address
ostensibly
the problem of to whom one attributes functions of (nonpersonified)
and comment. I to see the "narrator" as
selection, organization, prefer
an umbrella term for a cluster of possible functions, of which some are
selection, and of narrative
necessary (the organization, presentation
elements) and others (such as self-personification as teller,
optional
comment, and direct reader/narratee address). One of the of
provinces
the study of voice is precisely the identification and differentiation of
these varying functions. Where narration is reduced to selection it will,
of course, be possible to trace few (narratorial) voice effects, and one
no
can readily conceive of narrated (selected) speech reports where
narratorial idiom can be identified at all. Hence, once again, the
of distinguishing between narrator as function and narrative
importance
voice as effect.

Ultimately the problem of the narrator is not really one of ontology,

or at all, but one of method,
logical induction, linguistic verifiability
strategy, approach. Banfield is, at one level, right to insist that we are
faced with a choice of theories: one, a communication oriented model
which attributes to every utterance a speaker and to every narrative text
a narrator, and another informed by generative grammar which divides
the sentences of narrative into those with a narrator-subject and those
without. But she is wrong to imagine that "linguistic argument can
enable us to decide between these two theories" (US 185). All linguistic
can do?and in Banfield's case does?is create a series of
argument
internally coherent prove their own claims by definition?

axioms which
that is, tautologically. The real choice between these theories is the
pragmatic one made by the reader in the act of or interpreta
reading
tion. For the study of narrative discourse the pragmatic criteria of
reading have to be systematized according to principles of usefulness.
The question is less one of whether, in any existential sense, there is or
isn't a narrator in a given text, than the kind of knowledge or
understanding facilitated by positing or a narratorial function
denying
and identifying or repudiating the traces of a narrative voice. If,
therefore, I still find myself siding with Genette's commitment to the
narrator ("Narrative without a narrator, the utterance without an
uttering, seem to me
pure illusion and, as such, 'unfalsifiable'" [NDR
101]), this is largely because I share the sympathies by which that
commitment is informed. "For me, therefore, the widespread affirmations
.. . to which no one in the narrative is speaking arise not only
according
from the force of convention but also from an astonishing deafness to
texts" (NDR 101). This is not in the least to suggest that proponents of
the "narratorless narrative" thesis are in themselves inattentive readers
of narrative fiction,65 but rather that a metalinguistic concept of narra
tive voice is a better aid to hearing than a grammar with no place for the
idea of narratorial idiom at all.
Conclusions
E. L. Epstein has described style as "the regard what pays to how."66

This paper started out with an attempt to restore the "how" of subjective
to the of narrative voice, treated as a matter of
style concept narrowly
"level" by Genette. After
indicating the potential role of voice thus
qualitatively figured in establishing a narratorial instance, it insisted that
this textually reconstructible instance must be separated from projected
metatextual entities like the Benvenistean sujet d'?nonciation or the

Boothian "implied author." Voice, itwas insisted, is a heuristic metaphor,

and cannot function effectively as such if vehicle and tenor are col
lapsed. It was then proposed that in the narrative of
representation
speech and thought, voice is best identified contextually as an alterity
effect. It appeared, furthermore, to be more productive to measure
alterity from the representing (quoting, framing) instance than from an
ideally projected direct discourse utterance. Turning to the controver
sial question of dual voice, Ann Banfield's rigorously linguistic (genera
tive grammarian) methodology was compared with the metalinguistic
(dialogic) approach of Bakhtin. The analysis of literary examples
considered in this section suggested that while Banfield's formulae are
usable (internally coherent) as linguistic descriptions of narrative sen
tences, are not tools or methods for narrative texts.
they usefulas reading
They are ultimately reductive in that they claim all sentences of narrative
to be analyzable in terms of a group of very restrictedly defined concepts
in a corpus of prescriptive formulae. Bakhtin's approach, on the other
hand, undoubtedly raises questions of systematic validity, insofar as
many of the criteria of use remain analytically undefined. When applied
to literary texts, however, Bakhtin's methods are undeniably useful as
strategies of reading. They offer a coherent intellectual structure or
for reader responses. Furthermore, allow
argumentation pragmatic they
us to identify crucial differences between narrative texts, and do not
seek to reduce all their objects to a single set of incontrovertible rules.
Finally this paper took issue with the "narratorless narrative" thesis,
criticizing the overestimation of the role of the first-person pronoun as
an indicator of narratorial agency and defending the "intuitive" prin
ciple that all narratives are narrated, even if no distinct tellerpersona can
be identified (either pronominally or by means of stylistic expressivity).
the of the narrator was framed less as an existential
Ultimately question
or ontological question than as a pragmatic aspect of strategic reading.
While these observations in no amount to a of voice," I
way "theory
a theory
hope they may help to map at least some of the territory such
might fruitfully seek to occupy. Its premises will be "metalinguistic" in
the Bakhtinian sense, insofar as its objects are constructed dialogically in
the between structure and Rather than
space reception. constituting
linguistically axiomatic, text-immanent properties, textual voices will be

construed as the product of a dialogue between the reader and "the
traces [the narrating instance] has left?the traces it is considered to
have left?in the narrative discourse it is considered to have those
produced" (ND 214). These voices will be seen as qualitative projections

based on those discursive features identified in such a dialogue as
subject-bound?hence the central role of stylistic expressivity in the

identification and differentiation of voice effects. This holds for the

analysis of both narrator and character voices

fiction.in narrative
In
characterizing the voices of narrators?where voices are at
suchall
"audible" in narrative texts?this qualitative approach to voice will seek
to name more than merely an abstract speaker function or
subject
without bound to posit a uniform teller persona. It will,
position, being
with Nietzsche, figure "the subject as narrative
multiplicity,"67 locating
voice as in fact a composite configuration of voices, whose identity lies in
the rhetorical organization of their constituent elements. Essentially
pragmatic in orientation, it will address itself to the question of how?
that is, on the basis of a dialogue with what analyzable textual proce
dures?readers are able to construct differently speaking entities from
silent, written texts.
University of Cologne
NOTES
1 See Leo Spitzer, "Zur Entstehung der sog., erlebte Rede," in Germanisch-Romanishe
11 (1928), 327-32, on "erlebte Rede" (free indirect discourse) as "in der
Monatsschrift,
Mitte zwischen Rede und Schreibe" (in the middle ground between speech and writing).
2 G?rard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay inMethod, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, 1980),
hereafter cited in text as ND; G?rard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, tr. Jane E. Lewin
(Ithaca,1988), hereafter cited in text as NDR; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse:
NarrativeStructure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1978), hereafter cited in text as SD; Seymour
Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and Film (Ithaca, 1990); Susan
Sniader Lanser, The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction (Princeton, 1981), hereafter
cited in text as NA; and Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication, Theory and History of
Literature, 64 (Minneapolis, 1989); hereafter cited in text as NC.
3 Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction
(Boston, 1982), hereafter cited in text as US; Monika Fludernik, The Fictions of Language
and the Languages of Fiction (London, 1993); hereafter cited in text as FL.
4 Henry James, The Ambassadors (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 170; hereafter cited in text
as A.
5 This is, of course, to suggest that the narrator of The Ambassadors a range of
employs
voices in narrating his tale. Further examples of distinctive and distinguishable narratorial
voices in the novel will be given in the next section.
6 Genette seems, in his Narrative Discourse Revisited,
himself inclined to accept that, even in
this context, he did not devote sufficient space to the complex question of free indirect style.
7 There is clearly an implicit value judgment in Chatman's comparison of the styles of
Trollope and James, inherited from James's own censure of Trollope in his famous essay
"The Art of Fiction," of 1884. For my part, I do not mean here to treat squeaking, purring,
and roaring as normative terms.
8 John E. Tillford
noted sixty-five references to Strether as "our friend" in The
Ambassadors (John E. Tillford, "James, the Old Intruder," Modem Fiction Studies, 4 [1958],
158). I return to the issue of the first person pronoun as a
relatively weak marker of
narratorial overtness in James later in this essay.
9 See Ian Watt, "The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication," in
Essays
Criticism, 10 (1960), 250-74, and Seymour Chatman, The Later Style ofHenry fames (Oxford,
1972), pp. 22-25.

10 See Chatman, The Later Style of Henry fames, 72-76, and Ralf Norrman, The Insecure
World ofHenry fames's Fiction: Intensity and Ambiguity (London, 1982), pp. 6-65.
11 See Genette, Narative Discourse, pp. 255-59; Shomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction:
Contemporary Poetics (London, 1983), pp. 94-100; Michael J. Toolan, Narrative: A Critical
Linguistic Introduction (London, 1988), p. 82; and Fludernik, The Fictions of Language,
p. 443.
12 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (London, 1921), p. 164.
13 Donna Desire and Repression: The Dialectic
Przybylowicz, of Self and Other in the Late Works
ofHenry fames (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1986), p. 33.
14 Sheila Teahan, "What Maisie Knew and the Improper Third Person," Studies in
American Fiction, 21, no. 2 (1993), 132.
15 The "nonintrustive" argument has also had its critics, who have noted
repeatedly
discrepancies between Jamesian principle and practice. John Tillford's characterization of
as "the old intruder" has been substantiated and developed among others,
James by,
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), pp. 59, 173; Suzanne Ferguson,
"The Face in the Mirror: Authorial Presence in the Multiple Vision of Third-Person
Impressionist Narrative," Criticism 21, no. 3 (1979), 237-40; and Gene Moore, "Focaliza
tion and Narrative Voice in What Maisie Knew," Language and Style, 22, no. 1 (1989), 11-20.
Of these on the role of rhetorical
critics, however, only Moore touches and stylistic
elements in determining an overt narratorial presence.
16 Meir Sternberg, "Proteus in Quotation-Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported
Speech," Poetics Today, 3, no. 2 (1982), 114.

17 Meir Sternberg, Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction (Baltimore, 1978),
pp. 290-303.
18 For a highly of the concept of the "implied author" see Ansgar
convincing critique
N?nning, "Renaissance eines anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf auf
ein literaturkritisches Phantom? und Alternativen zum des
?berlegungen Konzept
"implied author" in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift f?r Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte,
67, no. 1 (1993), 1-25. N?nning's "alternative" to the implied author?replacing an
extratextual instance with a textual level, the "Gesamtstruktur des Textes"?is perhaps
more than the critique itself. The boundaries of such a "Gesamtstruktur"
questionable
would surely be hard to delimit: wouldn't they, for example, have to include intertextual
relations? Such problems are implicit in N?nning's notion of "structure" as (Spinozian)
"absent cause," which he borrows from Fredric Jameson's discussion of Althusser in The
Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London, 1981). Jameson uses the
concept of structure as absent cause to describe the totality of relations which constitute
a "mode of production." If the "Gesamtstruktur des Textes" is to be understood as the
text's "mode of production," it names a phenomenon much broader than a narrative
"level."
19 There is an interesting parallel between Coste's third person
reader-based reformula
tion of first person direct discourse and Etienne Lorck's
original formulation of the
concept of "erlebte Rede" (Etienne Lorck, Die "erlebte Rede": Eine sprachliche Untersuchung
[Heidelberg, 1921] ). See Roy Pascal, The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and itsFunctioning in
theNineteenth Century European Novel (Manchester, 1977), p. 23: "When the audience hears
Faust's opening monologue: 'I've now, alas! studied philosophy, law and medicine, and
too,' to Lorck it it in the third person: 'Faust
unhappily theology according 'experiences'
has now, alas! studied philosophy, law and medicine, and unhappily theology too, etc.'"
20 Indeed, Chatman's thankfully voiceless "implied author" is one of the few extratextual
constructs to insist on
their vital separation.
21 James Phelan, "The Concept of Voice, the Voice of Frederic Henry and the Structure
of A Farewell to Arms," in Hemingway: Essays of Reassessment, ed. Frank Scafella (Oxford,
1991), pp. 214-32.

22 The term "dual voice" was coined Pascal to describe "the mingling, even
by Roy
fusion, of two voices" in free indirect discourse. "We hear in 'style indirect libre' a dual
voice, which vocabulary, sentencestructure and subtly fuses the two

intonation
through
voices of the character and the narrator"(Pascal, The Dual Voice, pp. 32, 26).
23 See also Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences, who conceives of irony as a way of reading the
of an utterance, rather than something inherent to it: "Ironic
intentionality linguistically
meaning is not spoken and hence is not linguistic meaning" (p. 222).
24 See above "Free Indirect Discourse:
all Brian McHale, A Survey of Recent Accounts,"
Poetics and Thdry of Literature, 3 (1978), 249-87, and "Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural
Acts: Linguistics and Poetics Revised," Poetics Today, 4, no. 1 (1983), 17-56, hereafter cited
in text as US; Michael Peled Ginsburg, "Free Indirect Discourse: A Reconsideration,"
Language and Style, 15, no. 1 (1982), 133-49; and Fludernik, The Fictions of Language and the
Languages of Fiction.
25 "According to my model, FID can be defined by means of the conjunction of an
intervention on the part of the textual who a discourse of
interpretive recipient, posits
alterity (that is, a notional discourse SELF different from that of the reportative SELF of
the current with a minimal set of syntactic features, which constitute a
narrator-speaker),
sort of necessary condition, a mold that has to be fitted" (Fludernik, "The Linguistic
Illusion of Alterity," 95).
26 See Pascal, The Dual Voice.
27 "Dammit, late again" from a projected "Dammit," he said, "I'm late again." It is, of
course, on the basis of contextual cues that the reader can, in such cases, distinguish
only
between FID and interior monologue.
28 "Only the conjunction of formal criteria with situational context as recuperated from
context 'makes' FID" (Fludernik, "The Linguistic Illusion of Alterity," 101).
29 These two objections form the basis of Steinberg's "direct discourse" fallacy (Sternberg,
"Proteus in Quotation-Land").
30 See Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences, pp. 26-37.
31 Again the designation is Fludernik's. She discusses three such models in The Fictions of
Language, pp. 289-92. The most influential of these is Brian
("Free Indirect McHale
Discourse") with seven
graded categories ranging from diegetic summary to free direct
discourse at the mimetic end of the spectrum. Genette endorses McHale's model in
Narrative Discourse Revisited, offering his own convincing Proustian examples.
have in mind in its concrete
32 "[W]e discourse, that is, language living totality, and not
as the specific at through a
language object of linguistics, something arrived completely
legitimate and necessary abstraction from various aspects of the concrete life of the word.
But precisely those aspects in the life of the word that linguistics makes abstract are, for our
purposes, of primary importance. Therefore the analyses that follow are not linguistic in
the strict sense of the term. They belong rather to metalinguistics, ifwe understand by that
term the study of those aspects in the life of the word, not yet shaped into separate and
specific disciplines, that exceed?and completely legitimately?the boundaries of linguis

tics. Of course, metalinguistic research cannot ignore and must make use of its
linguistics
results. Linguistics and metalinguistics study one and the same concrete, highly complex,
and multifaceted phenomenon, namely the word?but they study it from various sides and
various of view .... From the vantage it is
points points provided by pure linguistics,
impossible to detect in belletristicliterature any really essential differences between a
monologic and a polyphonic use of discourse" (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's

Poetics, Theory and History of Literature, 8, ed. and tr. Caryl Emerson [Minneapolis, 1984],
pp. 181-82; hereafter cited in text as PD).
33 Henry James, What Maisie Knew (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 35; hereafter cited in text
as WM.
34 Mary Galbraith, "What Everybody Knew Versus What Maisie Knew: The in
Change

from the Prologue to the Opening of Chapter 1 in What

Epistemological Perspective
Maisie Knew" Style, 2, no. 2 (1989), p. 198; hereafter cited in text.
35 Consider the difference between the formal "pursuance" and "pursuit," a term that
might more readily have been attributed to the language of battle and conquest.
36 "[T]he primary source of language usage in the comic novel is a highly specific
treatment of 'common' the average norm of spoken and written
language?usually
for a given social group?is taken by the author precisely as the common view, as
language
the verbal approach to people and things normal for a given sphere of society, as the going
point of view and the going value, to one degree or another, the author distances himself
from this common language, he steps back and objectifies it, forcing his own intentions to
refract and diffuse themselves through the medium of this common view that has become
embodied in language (a view that is always superficial and frequently hypocritical)"
(Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, tr. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist [Austin, 1981], pp. 302-3); hereafter cited in text as DN.
37 "This," Bakhtin claims, "constitutes the distinguishing feature of the novel" ("Dis
course in the Novel," 299-300).
pp.
38 There are other of parison even in the very first paragraph of the novel; the
examples
most more decent" and "a compromise
striking being "scarcely less public and scarcely proposed
by his legal advisers and finally accepted by hers" (emphasis mine).
39 See in particular Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 279-82, and V. N. Volosinov,
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (Cambridge,
tr. Vern W.
Mass., pp. 86, 102; Mikhail
1986, Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays,
McGee (Austin, 1986), p. 86. In a later essay, "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin
even goes to far as to treat the notion of the "listener" as a "fiction" of linguistics, insisting
on the active aspect of the listener's "responsive understanding" {Speech Genres, p. 68).
40 See, for example, Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 189.
41 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 256
42 This is also clear from the following statement about parody: "In parody . . . there
cannot be that fusion of
possible in stylization
voices or the narration of a narrator"
(Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, p. 193).

43 This has already been done to great effect by McHale, "Unspeakable Sentences";
Manfred "Narration as Non-Communication: On Ann Banfield's Unspeakable
Jahn,
Sentences," K?lner Anglistische 23 (1983), 1-20; and Fludernik, The Fictions of
Papiere,
Language.
44 Again, of course, this refers only to an "I" outside of direct speech.
45 See Dorrit Cohn, Minds; Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in
Transparent
Fiction (Princeton, 1978), p. 47; cited in Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences, p. 187. Cohn adds
that "The possibility of even the slightest abstraction (the preference for the governess
over the father) the subject of quotable thought is expressly dispelled: 'she
becoming
. .'"To what
couldn't, or at any rate didn't, put it to herself that. degree, one might go on
to ask, can an idea that Maisie couldn't and didn't put to herself be expressive of her
"point of view"?
in a footnote
only one reference
46 makes to Genette,
Unspeakable Sentences, surprisingly,
on p. 278, where Genette's term "focalization" is remarkably as one of a number of
given
synonyms for "style indirect libre."
47 Genette makes an important distinction between two different uses of the first person
in narrative which is very pertinent here: "The presence
of first-person verbs in a
pronoun
text can . . . refer to two which
situations renders
narrative very indifferent grammar
own designation of
identical but which narrative analysis must distinguish: the narrator's
as such, as when Virgil writes arms and the man . . .,' or else the
himself '/sing of identity
of person between the narrator and one of the characters in the story, as when Crusoe

writes 'Iwas born in the year 1632, in the city of York ...' The term 'first-person narrative'
refers, obviously, only to the second of these situations" (Genette, Narrative Discourse,
quite
p. 244).
48 Henry James, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth, 1985), p. 150; hereafter cited in text
as GB.
49 "If narration contains a narrator, this T is not by the author; he is
speaking, quoted
narrating" (Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences, p. 179).
50 Banfield herself concedes in a footnote that "one does
find instances of the colloquial
second person to meanin 'one'
represented speech and thought, but this is not the you
which designates the ADDRESSEE/HEARER" {Unspeakable Sentences, p. 297). Surely she is
left with the question of how one can distinguish in a purely linguistic
sense one use from
the other.
51 The point ismade very convincingly by McHale, "Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural
Acts," 32.
52 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 262.
53 The scope of Fludernik's conclusion is, of course, much wider than the issue of
"narratorless narrative," and the implications of her book extend way beyond the limited
focus of this essay.
54 This use of the term "reflector" itself, of course, derives from James's own character
ization of his fiction.
55 The one for which Fludernik does not seem to reserve the term narrator is,
activity
rather surprisingly, the activity of narrating. I shall return to this point in a moment.
56 Here again one does well to bear in mind Genette's distinction between two different
uses of the first person pronoun in narrative. See n. 46.
57 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, tr. Kathleen Blarney (Chicago, 1992), p. 43.
58 "The word T does not mean the same as 'L.W.' even if I am L. W., nor does itmean
the same as the expression 'the person who is now speaking.' But that does not mean the
'L.W.' and T mean different things" (cited in Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 51). Ricoeur
himself argues that "T so little designates the referent of an identifying reference that
what appears to be its 'any person who, in speaking,
definition?namely, designates
himself or herself?cannot be substituted for the occurrences of the word T" (Ricoeur,
pp. 45-46).
59 Anaphoric in the classical rhetorical sense, rather than the linguistic sense of Banfield
and Fludernik: "Never . . . never"; "of intensity, of importunity." These rather weak
anaphoric links are admittedly only immediately noticeable because of the central role of
anaphora throughout the text as a whole.

60 Genette lists four other functions of the narrator in addition to the principle function
of storytelling: the directing function, the communicative function, the function of
attestation, and theideological function
(Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 255-59). In
Narrative Discourse Revisited, Genette renames the last function as the
"interpretative
function" n. 1). A similar list of functions is offered
(p. 131, by Jahn and N?nning, where
their first function, "presentation of the facts about events and existents" is referred to
as "the technical function" (Manfred and Ansgar
quite categorically obligatory Jahn
Nunning, "A Survey of Narratological Models," Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 27,
no. 4 [1994], 291).
61 Brian McHale, "Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts," Poetics and
Theory of Literature, 3 (1978), 281.

62 David Hayman, "Ulysses": The Mechanics ofMeaning (Madison, Wis., 1982), p. 122.
63 "Narration as Non-Communication," 16.
Jahn,
64 The notion of selection is clearly related to the intentional aspect of the idea of
discourse as A further to the
quotation. counterargument logic which informs the

idealized concept of "Pure-Speech-Records" can be found in Sternberg, "Proteus in
Quotation-Land," 130. Sternberg argues that quotation can never be identical with an
act because the quoted utterance is always affected by its position as an
original speech
"inset" in a new contextual "frame." To is always to "recontextualize a discourse."
quote
65 Fludernik's The Fictions of Language, for example, is astonishing for both the sheer
mass and depth of its close reading.
66 E. L. Epstein, Language and Style (London, 1978), p. 1.
67 Fridrich Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht, cited in Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, pp. 15-16.


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Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts

Author(s): Richard Aczel

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Although the frame of reference of such a concept of voice naturally

New Literary History, 1998, 29: 467-500

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Voice and Narrative Level

ambiguous (classically, for example, in a text like Virginia Woolf s To the

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Degrees of Narratorial Overtness

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category fetishism to which Genette's approach can potentially lead

Chatman means neither the character of the speaker (in an Aristotelian

distinctly than any feature short of explicit self-mention" (SD 228).

Trollope's Barchester Towers?Chatman reflects: "This squeaky machinery

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

undisguised use of (narrator-bound) rhetorical figures?in this case the

suggested, their intrusive effect is greater than that of the Jamesian

Narrator-bound stylistic expressivity is clearly a key characteristic of all

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

Between Narrator and Author

One of the most

crucial, and the tendency of some narratologists to couple this construct

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

the ontological conundrum altogether, Lanser turns to speech act

ontological status of historical truth" (NA 122). Lanser's "extrafictional

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

hardly less question-begging than the metaphor of voice, but almost

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or are involved in the production of a n?rrateme by the reader" (NC 166,

emphasis in original). The subject of the enunciation is, Coste reminds

linguistic clues as the structure of the action?for conveying a discrepancy in

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Voice and Context in Free Indirect Discourse

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

identifiable. That is to say the linguistic definition of FID is accurate but

Traditional discussions of FID tended to be based on a "tripartite

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

This content downloaded from 195.34.79.253 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 10:03:14 AM

well as a quoted utterance, to what degree is this quoting instance

Linguistic and Metalinguistic Voices

The significance for the study of narrative voice of Bakhtin's dialogic

Bakhtin defines double-voiced discourse as "discourse with an orienta

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"Another's discourse ... is not with a new intention, but it

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of the construction depends on the reader's recognition of the incon

insisting on the influence of heteroglossia on all speech, Bakhtin singles

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populated with the social intentions of others" are compelled to "serve a

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conflation of teller and writer, however, is only rendered more problem

It is therefore interesting that one of the most coherent and sustained

sentences of narration a first-person

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SELF, or that of a first-person narrator; both cannot speak in the same

uncritically to collapse language and point of view, voice and focaliza