Inhuman Voices

Brian Richardson

New Literary History, Volume 32, Number 3, Summer 2001, pp. 699-701 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2001.0043

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/24589

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 Commentary:
Inhuman Voices
Brian Richardson

T
he contributors to this issue admirably extend and recon-
ceptualize theoretical constructs of voice and narration. Manfred
Jahn’s investigation into narrative voice and agency in drama is a
salutary foray into a topic that is both rich and strangely undertheorized.
He offers an original outline of reception-oriented theories of drama—
poetic drama, theater studies, and reading drama—that simultaneously
comprehends much theoretical work of the past seventy-five years and
situates the subject as particularly ripe for narratological intervention.
This is true even if we see his term of synthesis, “reading drama,” as
already giving birth to its semiotic antithesis in performance art, a
theatrical medium that plays at and beyond the edges of drama,
narrative, and language. Particularly important is his presentation of the
three types of narrators within or behind a play. One sincerely hopes
that narrative and dramatic criticism will not be so neglectful of the re-
sources of the stage (and the reading of its stage directions) in the
future. The further question that then presents itself of whether the
anonymous and impersonal narrative function responsible for the se-
lection and arrangement of the events is the same as the one which is
responsible for the text of the stage directions; I suspect it will be
difficult to keep these figures distinct. In addition, the attention Jahn
draws to Pericles’ Gower, a somewhat ineffectual narrator, raises the
possibility that the recent attention devoted to rethinking the unreliable
narrator will extend to such limited or duplicitous narrators as Shake-
speare’s Gower or Rumor, the “presenter” of 2 Henry IV.
Andrew Gibson’s essay is cunningly composed and beautifully written.
Unfortunately, the elegant symmetry of its presentation is also respon-
sible for its major conceptual weakness. Gibson’s position is based on an
opposition between literary narrative in which voice is always metaphori-
cal and cinematic narratives in which actual voices are “haunted” by
writing. This dyad can only be maintained by ignoring the many
adjacent works that fail to fit these depictions. In oral narratives, as I
have indicated above, voice is literal and the text is entirely coextensive
with its being spoken; narrative and performance are identical. At the

New Literary History, 2001, 32: 699–701

700 new literary history

same time, Gibson’s formulation must ignore the numerous cinematic

experiments that incorporate the very elements of spontaneity and
improvisation which he claims the medium invariably excludes. Even if,
for the sake of the argument, we were to grant his claim that “voice in
film is no more a part of an immediate representation of a living world
there before expression than is writing,” the proper response might well
be, “All right, but so what?” Performances that include spontaneous and
improvised representations can be found throughout our culture, from
minimally scripted performance art to improvised comedy acts to
unexpected turns of events on live television shows. What is supposed to
be so crucial about unscripted, immediate, or extemporaneous voices
that their absence in commercial films is of any theoretical significance?
Further, Gibson’s essay is grounded on Derrida’s claim that the Western
philosophical tradition privileges speech over writing, certainly one of
the least defensible formulas of deconstruction. Deconstruction de-
mands a clear-cut set of opposed positions even if it must fabricate them,
and is relatively helpless before a shifting field of intersecting trajecto-
ries. Essence, origin, identity, and teleology have long been under attack
within avant-garde films and dramas; it is these works that are in the
greatest need of narratological investigation.
Monika Fludernik importantly points out the fallacies of the critical
practice of projecting real-life parameters into the reading process and
foregrounds the corresponding limitations of theorists who feel com-
pelled to invent a hypostatized narrator figure who is responsible for
each act of narration. For some time, it has been understood that
literary characters function both as real people might and as purely verbal
constructs do; surely it is time to grant the same dual status to narration:
it might be constructed as if uttered or written by an individual human,
or it might be a tissue of divergent discourses spliced together for a
particular literary effect, and utterly irreducible to a single realistic
subject. Fludernik’s examples are very compelling—indeed, irrefut-
able—and could be usefully extended. Once we go beyond the merely
mimetic postulate that every narration must have one (and only one)
narrator, we are free to reassess any number of experimental texts where
this equation does not hold. One thinks of the multiple, incompatible
idiolects present in many of the later chapters of Ulysses that criticism
before 1980 had unsuccessfully tried to subsume within the voice of a
single figure. Likewise, we may ask precisely what “natural” mode of
communication is being abrogated in the unusual speech situation of
the ostensible narrators of The Waves. More radical are the disparate
personal voices that bleed into one another in nouveaux romans of
Claude Simon and Robert Pinget. And there is always Beckett, whose
work might serve as a commentary on some of the issues being debated
inhuman voices 701

in these pages. Company opens with the line, “A voice comes to one in
the dark. Imagine,”1 while the rest of the text attempts to interrogate the
identity, source, and status of that dubious voice. Such conceptions can
also help us make sense of the unstable narrative voices that emerge
from and are collapsed back into one another in other texts like The
Unnameable.
Richard Aczel questions what he sees as Fludernik’s granting of
rhetorical priority to the features of natural narrative, against which all
“deviations” are measured. But surely the source of this stance is the
overwhelmingly mimetic bias of poetics and narrative theory from
Aristotle to the present. There has always been a wide range of
antimimetic texts since the time of Aristophanes; however, with the
exception of a few notable figures like Bakhtin, such unruly works have
not been theorized in a comprehensive manner. A small number of
theorists working with postmodern texts are now beginning to describe
a different, counter-poetics, one based on creative transformation rather
than attempts at verisimilar representation; centered, that is, on poeisis
instead of mimesis. Fludernik’s work here (as elsewhere) is taking us
further along that important but still largely unfamiliar road.

NOTE

1 Samuel Beckett, Company (London, 1980).