"Voice" in Narrative Texts: The Example of As I Lay Dying Author(s): Stephen M. Ross Reviewed work(s): Source: PMLA, Vol.

94, No. 2 (Mar., 1979), pp. 300-310 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/461893 . Accessed: 31/01/2013 21:23
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

STEPHEN M. ROSS

"Voice"in NarrativeTexts: The Example of As I Lay Dying

JOHN BARTH, in Lost in the Funhouse, touches the heart of the problem I want to consider here when he has his narrator Menelaus assert a purely vocal identity: "this isn't the voice of Menelaus; this voice is Menelaus, all there is of him. ... I am this voice, no

more."1 Barth (or is it Menelaus?) reminds us that a story-its persons and places, its deeds and disappointments-may be nothing more than the voice that tells it. The "person" named Menelaus is to be discovered only "in" his voice; "he" has no existence without voice, before or after voice, beyond or behind voice. Such is the nature of all things in fiction: they "exist" only by virtue of discourse. But Barth does not have Menelaus say "I am this discourse, no more." He says "voice," a word implying, far more strongly than "discourse," singular human origin: a voice presumably emanates from someone, though the source may be hidden or unnamed. Persons have voices; fictional characters, narrators, authors (we say) have voices. Barth neatly locates one paradox of verbal representation: in narrative, voice creates, and is logically prior to, person; yet Menelaus (wearing after all a person's name) speaks in "his" voice.' Such play should prompt us to look closely at "voice." What is the status of voice in narrative? The word crops up often in critical discourse, but its place (not to mention its meaning) is uncertain. Ordinary usage connects "voice" with sound: "sound, or the whole body of sounds made or produced by the vocal organs of man ... vocal sound as the vehicle of human utterance or expression.":' But so common has "voice" become in discussions of literature that it is already finding its way into glossaries of literary terms, and its figurative origins may be forgotten.4 I do not wish to contemplate "voice" by col-

lecting samples of its use in criticism, an exercise that would take us only a short way toward understanding all that the concept implies. Instead I want to pry loose some cherished assumptions about fictional "reality" by applying various legitimate uses of "voice" to a single narrative text, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. We will discover by doing this that "voice" can be a valuable "positive lever" in analyzing fiction and in examining the bases of our own critical discourse about narrative.5' The fifty-nine sections of Faulkner's polyphonic novel, each headed by the name of one of the fifteen first-person narrators, exhibit a striking variance in tone: we "hear" the dialect of poor white Mississippi farmers, talk by smalltown shopkeepers, tense and fast-paced narrative, richly metaphoric digression, and philosophically charged speculation burdened by Latinate diction and convoluted syntax. The sections range in length from one sentence ("My mother is a fish") to ten pages; one section is a numbered list of reasons for building a coffin "on the bevel," another a reminiscence by a rotting corpse. In the hope of bringing order to this cacophony, let us begin by noting two kinds of voice in the novel. The first we can call mimetic voice because it derives from verbal imitation and representation. The second we can label textual voice because it arises from certain functions of the physical text itself, from the written discourse exclusive of represented speech or speakers. I Mimetic voice can be examined on three levels of discourse, levels distinguished by the postulated origins for the voice or voices discerned: dialogue (characters' speech acts), nar-

300

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Stephen M. Ross
rative (storytelling by identifiable narrators), and authorial discourse (which seems to originate with a "speaker" outside the fictional world). As discernible in dialogue, mimetic voice is, simply enough, the "vehicle of human utterance and expression" possessed by fictional characters and heard (or at least hearable) by other characters. In a sentence like "'Where's Jewel?' pa says," the quotation marks and speaker identification classify "Where's Jewel?" as speech uttered by a person (pa) possessing a voice.6 Speech and voice "occur" as phenomena represented in the narrative. This all sounds obvious, but exactly how we should regard such represented speech is not obvious. Gerard Genette argues, for example, that direct discourse in narrative is not representational. Quoted speech, Genette claims, is "perfect" mimesis, "completely identical with [the character's] discourse"; but perfect mimesis is not mimetic since it is "the thing itself": "the work of re-presentation is nonexistent" because discourses by characters can be reproduced "literally." Genette draws this analogy: if a painter were to glue an oyster shell onto his canvas, he would be inserting an actuality into an imitative medium; so too does direct speech "consist simply of interpolating in the middle of a text representing events another text drawn directly from these events."7 I would argue in exactly the opposite direction, that we must recognize the extent to which dialogue in narrative is representational. When transcribed on paper, oral speech (be it fictitious or reported) has been turned into writing, and is thus re-presented to us in a new expressive shape, just as other acts and events are "presented anew." While the question "Where's Jewel?" is spoken in the universe of the novel, the utterance comes to the reader only as a written imitation. Writing, even of direct discourse, cannot be reduced to recorded speech, for the recording, the particular articulation of words, is itself part of the narrative's aesthetic work. It is similarly incorrect to assume (as Genette apparently does) that direct discourse can duplicate perfectly some ideal "content" of an original discourse, a content unaffected by its material embodiment. On the contrary, the textual and narrative context for dialogue affects "what"

301

is said just as the placing of Genette's oyster shell-its position on the canvas, its size relative to the background, its texture and color in relation to the paint-transforms that "real" shell into a "re-presented" shell. A shell can be used to represent a shell just as discourse can be used to represent discourse. (In epistolary novels we might say that writing is used to represent writing.) The "interpolation" Genette speaks of is a crucial act with aesthetic consequences, an act requiring "the work of re-presentation." Dialogue, then, is always representational. The common assumption that direct discourse is somehow exempt from the manipulations of mimesis is in need of close scrutiny.8 Words spoken by a character have frequently been regarded as more "real" than nonverbal phenomena represented in the same text; quoted speech possesses a kind of epistemological sanctity, a "facticity" seldom challenged even in a narrative that places all other represented "realities" under suspicion. The most untrustworthy narrator, for example, is assumed to remain a faithful recorder of other characters' speechesdirect discourse is, in fact, often the only certain occurrence in a story. Its reliability warns the reader of the narrator's unreliability.9 Our expectations about speech, in other words, tend to dissimulate the artifice that puts it in written narrative. That audible speech and represented "speech" are both verbal discourse does, of course, make the "work of re-presentation" seem easier with dialogue than with other types of mimesis; writers do not exploit the same techniques and conventions to produce conversation as they do to depict a gunfight, say, or to describe a sunset. But the representation is nonetheless grounded in convention. Readers share expectations about represented speech that range from knowledge of the "rules" of punctuating dialogue to acceptance of mannerisms (like phonetic spelling) unique to a given work, and these conventions are in principle as open to manipulation as any others. Once we recognize that direct discourse is governed by convention, that it is not "natural," we are better able to unmask some of the maneuvers behind which a narrative like As I Lay Dying can hide its own play. Quotation marks, to mention only one example, create speech (and imply voice) by fiat, merely by asserting

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

302

"Voice" in Narrative Texts

"real" voice? Does his "true" discourse have "hit" or "it," "keer" or "care"? We cannot answer such questions at the level of dialogue because all the talking that takes place within the fictional world of As I Lay Dying is quoted by characters in their capacity as narrators. When Anse speaks his heaviest dialect, we discover, he is always being quoted by a "town" person-Doc Peabody, Macor When Gowan, quoted by country Moseley. folk, Anse's talk exhibits fewer signs of the vernacular. As I Lay Dying seems to imitate not how a character sounds but how one character sounds to another: to Peabody, Anse says "hit" and "keer" and "sich"; whereas to Darl, or to Vernon Tull, the words are "it," "care," and "such" regardless of their phonetic properties, perhaps because Darl and Tull make the sound "hit," too. The "real" sound of Anse's speech would seem to depend on the ear of the listener.'1

that certain words are to be regarded as having been, or as now being, spoken; quotation marks pledge a "true" rendering of just these words in the same order as spoken at some time by the person identified as the speaker. Accustomed as we are to this usage, we should not forget that it is merely a convention: we expect the words inside quotation marks to be truly recorded, but we can be disappointed. (Faulkner, as we shall see in a moment, plays upon this expectation.) Until roughly the nineteenth century, quotation marks were merely citation marks, employed exclusively for quoting another author's written words.10 The evolution of the practice of marking both spoken and written discourse with the same sign-a procedure that lent to reported speech the verifiability of cited written passages -may be connected by more than temporal coincidence to the advent of the realistic novel and its supposed rendering of an "objective" actuality. Quoted oral discourse in any narrative implies mimetic voice, though the degree of imitation can vary considerably. Since the early nineteenth century, writers have tried, with ever increasing skill, to represent the sound of talking-not the "sound waves," of course, but the inscribable sounded differences among speakers. We "hear" this speech by Anse Bundren: "'Hit was jest one thing and then another' he says. 'That ere corn me and the boys was aimin to git up with, and Dewey Dell a-taken good keer of her, and folks comin in, a-offerin to help and sich, till I
jest thought . . .'"

prose, with its visual conventions like contractions, phonetic spelling, and the "a-" in "a-taken," with its "fillers" ("that ere corn") and regionalisms, does seem to be a highly mimetic attempt to record actual speech. But a term like "actual" seldom explains much about As I Lay Dying. The speech appears in a section narrated by Doc Peabody. When Anse is quoted in other sections his dialect "sounds" and looks quite different: "'She's counted on it,' pa says. 'She'll want to start right away. I know her. I promised her I'd keep the team here and ready, and she's counting on it'" (p. 17). Except for the contractions, there is little mimetic rendering in this: "g" is nqt dropped from "ing"; no words are spelled phonetically. What then is the "real" sound of Anse Bundren's speech? What is his

(p. 43).

Such idiomatic

We might expect, then, to find speech consistently rendered at the narrative level. Surely we would "hear" a character's "true" voice when he talks to us instead of to other characters. Again, however, the novel disallows a notion of "true." By criteria of verisimilitude the narrative discourse is inconsistent and implausible, so much so that Faulkner has been accused of botching the first-person point of view, or at the very least of turning third person into first person by arbitrarily substituting "I" for "he" or "she." Critics discover discourse they cannot believe: Vardaman, the littlest Bundren, speaks of his brother's horse as "an unrelated scattering of components-snuffings and stampings; smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of co-ordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is" (p. 55). The objection raised here is very simple. Vardaman as a person could not talk this way; therefore he is poorly employed as a narrator.12 This complaint carries beneath its surface the assumption that voice must be an index of personal identity. Just as direct discourse is granted closer ties to "reality" than other discourse in a text, so it is judged more rigorously by standards of plausibility. It is assumed not only that a voice belongs to some person but also that it is in crucial ways "appropriate" to that person-to

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Stephen M. Ross
his or her socioeconomic class, level of education, and so on. Any loosening of the bond between voice and person violates verisimilitude and "sounds unnatural" to the reader's ear, because the reader has accepted the representation of that person as an actuality. Violations of point of view, of what we can plausibly see, disgruntle commentators on As I Lay Dying less than do violations of voice. Darl Bundren's clairvoyance (he narrates a number of events he could not possibly observe) and Addie's posthumous reminiscence are less bothersome than Vardaman's description of the horse because Darl and Addie "sound" natural-natural, that is, to the person constituted by our reading.13 As I Lay Dying forces us to remove the hyphen from "character-narrator" and maintain the distinction between kinds of persona. Although Vardaman is represented as a character in his and in others' narrative sections, as a narrator he is his voice and nothing more. He is never depicted narrating, since the novel contains no storytelling scenes. When we try to describe or to judge Vardaman as a narrator, we are inescapably caught in the paradox John Barth's Menelaus opened to us, the paradox we can rephrase as "this isn't the voice of Vardaman; this voice is Vardaman, all there is of him." We cannot solve the paradox by invoking some unwritten rule of "expressive identity" by which person and voice must correspond, because as a narrator Vardaman (and all the novel's narrative personae) emerges from his voice: voice, that is, constitutes the person we want to say voice must be appropriate to. (The critics of Faulkner's method seem willing, somewhat inconsistently, to allow Darl his highly sophisticated diction because he uses it in all his sections, even though as a character he does not deserve any greater tolerance than Vardaman. Darl also is his voice, but presumably we are to grant him his voice as if he did exist beyond it as a person.) We cannot explain the inconsistencies in the dialogue by integrating direct speech into a "higher" order of discourse, the narrative. The text sets voices in playful oscillation, the way a painter sometimes plays with the figure and ground of a picture-now we see a goblet, now the outlines of a face; now we "hear" a character named "Darl" saying "I reckon," now we

303

"hear" a narrator named "Darl" comparing Addie's coffin to "a cubistic bug." In As I Lay Dying there is no guaranteed discursive hierarchy. The novel itself calls our attention to this separation of voice from person: "Whitfield begins. His voice is bigger than him. It's like they are not the same. It's like he is one, and his voice is one . . . the mud-splashed one and the one triumphant and sad" (p. 86). In Of Grammatology Jacques Derrida demonstrates that even Saussure, heir as he was of the Western logocentric metaphysic, could not allow the relationship between signified and signifier, which he postulated as arbitrary, to remain utterly ungrounded: Saussure's theory of signs faltered when, accepting without question the primacy of speech over writing, he claimed that speech was "naturally" bound to consciousness.14 Criticism exhibits its own urge to halt the play of voices in a polyphonic text like As I Lay Dying by chasing after a forever receding "presence," that of nonverbal consciousness. We can harken to the novel's narrative voices as echoes of consciousness by treating the sections as interior monologues. The "reality" being imitated in any section is the narrator's psyche; his narrative voice is merely a tool that the artist manipulates in order to represent consciousness. The narrator's voice can be augmented by the author's intruding voice in order to "convey eloquently the character's secret obsessions, to bring into the light of language all the unspoken obscurity seething within his tortured mind."15 Peabody quotes Anse as saying "hit" and "keer" because that is how he experiences Anse's socially inferior dialect; Vardaman perceives, or feels, the horse as "an unrelated scattering of components" even though he could never say such a phrase "out loud." The narrative discourse becomes, from this interpretive perspective, a symbolic medium bearing no implication that actual discourse is being quoted. We "hear" in our reading whatever is necessary for a full portrayal of a character's intuitive consciousness. Rhetorically the sections are "interior," if this means that they occur outside any dramatic context and without being overtly addressed to the reader-that is, without audience. Nothing in the novel's own represented events locates the narratives within some context exterior to the

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

304

"Voice" in Narrative Texts

them: the sound of Cash's sawing, for example, is likened to snoring by four narrators-though each couches the metaphor in a slightly different form: "It sounds like snoring" (Cora, p. 9); "Cash's saw snores steadily" (Peabody, p. 45); "the saw begins to snore again" (Darl, p. 49); "The saw sounds like it is asleep" (Vardaman, p. 63). The manner in which the metaphor is "said" does not individualize the narrator's consciousness so much as does his manner of talking. Individuality becomes evident, often, only in talk, in how one narrator "expresses" something, not in any psychic "content" or (as Bleikasten put it) in any "unspoken obscurity seething within a tortured mind." Tull's and Darl's descriptions of the flood-swollen river evince a shared awareness rendered unique to each character only by voice: The water was cold. It was thick, like slush ice. Only it kind of lived. One part of you knowed it was just water, the same thing that had been runningunder this same bridge for a long time, yet when them logs would come spewing up outen it, you were not surprised, like they was a part of water, of the waiting and the threat. (Tull, p. 131) Before us the thick dark current runs. It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrouslyinto fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanentand profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something huge and alive waked for a moment of lazy alertnessout of and into light slumber again. (Darl, p. 134) The perceptions, the verbal images of the river as alive and threatening, even some aspects of syntax are all virtually the same here-yet how different the passages "sound." The differences can be isolated only with reference to imitated talk, to mimetic voice. "Consciousness" cannot serve us as a presence, as a groundwork of the "real" on which to rest the novel's shifting linguistic patterns, for consciousness itself is constituted by voice rather than revealed by it. We could turn to "authorial" discourse for a haven from this array of voices at the levels of dialogue and narrative, especially given the recognizable "Faulknerian" ring to so much of the diction and phrasing ("ceaseless and myriad," "impermanent and profoundly signifi-

narrator's mind. But a strict application of the term "interior" presupposes a metaphysics of consciousness, a metaphysics that the novel challenges. None of the sections is framed by a storytelling situation; yet many "sound" publicly told. Verisimilitude of narrating voice can, by itself, create dramatic context. Mimetic voice creates scene, through mannerisms totally within a narrator's voice that imply an audience, a place, and even a time of telling.'6 The degree to which given sections sound "public," like the degree to which they are colloquial, varies throughout the novel; the effect of this is to obliterate any strict demarcation between interior and exterior, between thought and talk. All the sections are interior by one criterion, exterior by another equally valid criterion. The narrators do speak instead of think or muse or "free-associate," but as narrators they speak to no one (not even themselves) who is not a product solely of their own voices. The only "reality," again, seems to be mimetic voice. Yet it is probably true that most readers are more comfortable with disruptions in verisimilitude if they sense that the narrative is unveiling the ineffable mysteries of the human mind than if they feel the disruptions to be arbitrary. 7 The variance from "public" to "private" tone in the narrative voices might not seem enough by itself to banish "interior monologue" from consideration. But As I Lay Dying renders the presence of intuitive consciousness problematical in another way deriving from mimetic voice. If indeed the novel seeks to portray a series of individual consciousnesses, if what anchors the voices to some sort of "reality" is consciousness, then we might expect to find different "inner" perceptions of, and reactions to, the same events on the part of different narrators. We do find that each character responds in his or her own way, but the various narrators (and we must again insist on the distinction between character and narrator) perceive and respond with striking uniformity. Indeed, "consciousness" in As I Lay Dying often seems a matter more of communal awareness than of psychological idiosyncracies -and this is perhaps to say that, rather than being revealed by language, consciousness is the language used and shared by the narrators. Not only do narrators perceive the same phenomena, but they employ the same metaphors to describe

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Stephen M. Ross
cant"). The common expectation that every voice emanates from a single human source leads us to seek a person for any voice we hear; if we detect discourse inappropriate to character or narrator, we look behind the fiction for an author. Even when no such entity as an author can be discovered, we still try to identify "him" in a speech implying human origin somewhere just over the horizon of the imagined world. Faulkner's method, critics tell us, is nothing but "omniscience in disguise" or "omniscience with
teeth in it."18

305

jugates himself?) to "his" voice-and thus "he" vanishes, leaving the novel originless but not (as one commentator put it) "fundamentally
silent."21

The idea of an author's voice introduces into our discussion major problems in poetics (problems I do not try to solve here). Critics often use the term "voice" in conjunction with "author" or some idea of author, and "voice" has been formally defined as "the creating, ordering, artistic intelligence that we recognize behind any narrating persona" (emphasis added).19 But by trying to straddle the gap between author as person and text as discourse, the use of "voice" to identify an author or implied author skirts the issues that the very concept of "author" raises. It confuses all too easily "creator" with "speaker"; such a definition of "voice" tries to explain discourse grounded in a represented world by turning it into discourse grounded outside the represented world. Michel Foucault speaks of the gap the idea of an "author" opens: "It would be as wrong to seek the author on the side of the real writer as on the side of the fictional speaker; the function of the author is realized in the split between the two."20 "Voice" tempts us as a metonymy for "author" because it can include within its semantic boundaries "person," "utterance," "style," and other terms that cluster around the creation of any particular discourse. But when used as a metonymy for "author," or for "authorial discourse," "voice" merely begs the question of its nature. The gap Foucault describes opens in As I Lay Dying the very moment we recognize that discourse uttered by "Darl" (or some other narrator) is in some way "Faulknerian." If As I Lay Dying does lead the reader to seek an author, it does not do so as a means of anchoring voices in the "presence" of an author; the author, like the narrator, is constituted by mimetic voice, and the paradox of fictional representation remains unresolved. In As I Lay Dying the author is subjugated (sub-

Now that we have explored the problem of mimetic voices in As I Lay Dying, perhaps a general definition is in order: "Mimetic voice" is that collection of features in a work's discourse which prompts readers to regard a particular portion of the work's total discourse as the utterance of an imagined person (character, narrator, "author"). These features are for the most part conventional, since (as we have seen) expectations about an utterance and its source allow the features constituting mimetic voice to function as they do. These features include the mechanics of written dialogue (punctuation, speaker identification, etc.); the conventions of imitating speech (phonetic spelling, colloquial phrasing, etc.); and grammatical forms (such as "shifters") that call attention to the source, time, and place of utterance. We could also include any feature of the discourse governed by word "expressive identity" (see p. 303)-the choice in dialogue, for example, or in style indirect libre. As I Lay Dying both enhances and challenges mimetic voice by disrupting the expected correlations between voice and person. The features of the discourse that lead the reader to identify and to characterize speakers operate ambiguously for some utterances, so that we may be unable to specify an appropriate speaker, or we may be forced to acknowledge two or more possible speakers (usually on different discursive levels) for a single utterance. In this way the problematical status of verbal representation in general and of mimetic voice in particular becomes a crucial part of what this novel signifies. II As I Lay Dying generates a second kind of voice, the textual. If "mimetic voice" deserves the word "voice" in its name because it "represents" in literature phenomena of speech that involve voice, "textual voice" deserves the name "voice" because it carries out in a text a function analogous to that of voice in speech. Textual voice does not require imagined speakers; as

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

306

"Voice" in Narrative Texts

lion." Whenever I speak, there is a residue of signification beyond the words and their arrangements, a residue made up partly of conventions (which writing marks only inadequately) and partly of my unique way of embodying language. That is my voice. Textual voice arises in an analogous way. When language is embodied in writing (in print in most literary works), textual voice is the aspect of the printed text that generates signification without necessary reference to verbal signification. "Textual voice" refers to that portion of a text's signification contributed by the form in which language is embodied, that is, by its parole. Since it is part of a literary work's context, the printed book, in theory, already has some bearing on the discourse and its signifying activity. The felt participation of the text may be close to nil, however; if all conventions of print (typography, punctuation, etc.) are strictly adhered to, readers are oblivious of the text as object. But when some feature of the inscribed text implicates itself in the signifying activity, then textual voice can be discerned. Textual voice, then, is the result of elements in the physical text that signify without necessary dependence on language and that prompt or allow the reader to regard the printed text as a source of signification. This definition describes an analogy between voice in speech and what I am here calling textual voice. Textual voice does not "represent" speech, nor does it lead to an anthropomorphic "speaker." It is a function of the text's discourse that identifies and "characterizes" a discursive origin, the text itself, just as mimetic voice identifies and characterizes imaginary speakers. As soon as a feature of the text functions to represent or imitate speech, it ceases to belong, properly speaking, to the work's paralinguistic context and becomes part of the work's representations. In principle textual voice and mimetic voice are mutually exclusive, although they join in the work's total signifying activity. Those features in a text that give rise to textual voice do so on the visual plane. They may or may not have oral counterparts, but in a text they function when read, when apprehended by the reader's eye.23 The textual features must articulate a visual difference that signifies. The analogy to voice in speech holds in this, too:

a function of the text alone it may augment representational processes in a narrative, but in principle textual voice is independent of mimesis. Before looking at the textual voice of As I Lay Dying, we need to develop this analogy between voice in speech and textual voice. In any discourse, whether speech or literary text, some portion (however small) of the discursive signification arises from a paralinguistic context. The significant context of speech includes tone of voice, gesture, volume, proximity of speaker to listener, and so on. Theoretically, contextual signification can be contemplated apart from language and need have no relation to verbal signification. Thus we could identify certain gestures or intonations as significant in themselves, irrespective of the words they accompany. In practice, of course, the demarcation between context and language is difficult to draw, because the two are to a large extent mutually reinforcing. We can note, however, that the paralinguistic context is limited, by definition, to parole: contextual signification can arise only when a specific discursive act takes place.22 One component in the paralinguistic context, the one most intimately involved with language (that is, with langue), is the embodiment given to language in a discursive act. In speech, language comes forth as sound; sounds emitted in the speech act embody language and make it manifest. Voice is the signifying aspect of linguistic embodiment. We designate as "voice" that aspect of signifying activity wherein the embodiment of language generates signification, without necessary reference to verbal signification. To put it another way, "voice" names that portion of signification contributed by the physical form in which language is made manifest. And, because the embodying of language is an act (occurring in speech, in writing, and in reading) governed largely by convention yet permitting individual variation, voice allows and even prompts an auditor to regard a discourse as an utterance by some specifiable person. Voice establishes and affects the relationships among utterance, speaker, and listener. We have all played the familiar game of altering what a sentence says by shifting vocal emphasis from word to word: "Shoot the lion." "Shoot the lion?" "Shoot the lion!" "Shoot the lion." "Shoot the

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Stephen M. Ross
those features of speech that we identify as voice depend on audible differences, on articulated differences that signify. Writers, especially poets, have long experimented with visual effects, with how the eye reads the text. Fiction writers have done this less extravagantly than poets, but they have done so nonetheless. The run-on prose that Joyce uses in Molly Bloom's soliloquy has become a common way to write so-called stream-of-consciousness prose, and clearly in such discourse some signification accrues to the printed form of the unpunctuated sentences. John Barth wrote of his story "Menelaiad" (which I invoke at the beginning of this essay) as a narrative for "printed voice" because some of its effects (the quotes within quotes within quotes .. .) depend on the reader's seeing them.24 Faulkner himself experimented frequently with punctuation, speaker even wanted The identification, italics-he Sound and the Fury printed in different colored inks.25 Attention to literature's printed surface, whether paid by poet, fiction writer, or critic, has too often been regarded as a trivial enterprise. But a thoroughgoing poetics must confront literature as inscribed object and recognize that it can be engaged only through an act of reading. Proper attention to the nature of writing will be concerned, not simply with isolated experiments, but with the role that vision plays in all reading and the effect of print on signification in all works.26 Such a concern would not seek to "empiricize" criticism naively by treating literary works solely as objects we check out of libraries. But we too often forget what Derrida warns us, that any embodiment of language already "re-presents" its own form: writing masks its materiality behind verbal meaning, behind communicative function, behind its potential to be spoken; but it is still writing. As I Lay Dying exhibits many features that generate textual voice. These are the major categories: 1. Frequent changes to and from italic type. 2. The section headings and the novel's title. 3. "Run-on" sentences (and other syntactic forms common to stream-of-consciousness writing). 4. Variations in, or absence of, expected speaker identification.

307

5. Unusual punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and paragraphing.27 6. The sequence of sections. 7. Various isolated features that call attention to the text as an inscribed object. Three examples: (a) the sketch of the coffin's shape (p. 82); (b) the presenting of what a road sign "says" first as one would see it-"New Hope 3 mi."-and then as one would "say" it-"New Hope three miles" (p. 114); (c) the numbered list of reasons for building the coffin "on the bevel" (pp. 77-78).28 Some of these features are more closely linked to the novel's verbal signification, and to its representations, than others, but each in some way calls attention to the text as a source of signification. Readers have a strong tendency (a tendency Faulkner plays on) to "naturalize" these features of textual voice by referring them to some represented "reality" other than the text-just as viewers will lean closer to try to make out the nude descending the staircase in Marcel Duchamp's famous painting. But as we discovered with mimetic voice, representational reduction fails to account for the experience of reading As I Lay Dying (or for the experience of viewing Duchamp's painting). No translation of textual features can fully "silence" the textual voice. The section headings, for example, do name the narrator in each section, but the status of these names is ambiguous. Do they identify speakers of the narrative discourse, so that we should read them as we do speaker identifications in dialogue (the heading of the first section would then be read as if it were "Darl said")?29 This would impose a dramatic context of sorts on the narration, turning the sections into overt monologues and demanding that we treat them as speech, but such an approach is difficult to reconcile with what we hear in many sections. Perhaps instead we should regard the headings as labels only, as labeling the discourse as "belonging to" Darl, Vardaman, Addie, Tull, or some other character. But this procedure would merely substitute the ambiguity of "belongs to" for the ambiguity of the heading itself-how does a discourse "belong" to someone if he or she does not speak it, or write it? Perhaps the headings name the "consciousness" being revealed to us in the section-the first section is Darl. But consciousness will not suffice as a sub-

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

308

"Voice" in Narrative Texts

the difference created by a type change is discursive: in some way the entire italicized passage is different in status from the preceding and following passages in roman type. But different in what way? For each type change we might devise a rationale appropriate to the context of the particular section in which it occurs. But no pattern emerges. Sometimes the italics accompany a change in narrative time (pp. 86-87); sometimes they mark a distinction between two "fields of perception" (p. 85); sometimes they hint that a "sublimated" or "deeper" level of consciousness is being exposed in the italicized discourse than in the roman (p. 205). This list of possibilities could be extended until each change in type has its own "reality" to explain it, but this would merely substitute our own fiction for the one given by the text. The italics do not equal anything. They are arbitrary textual variations that articulate a difference. Just as the novel does not allow us to reduce mimetic voice to an imaginary speaker, it continually drives us away from "represented realities" that might account for, and silence, textual voice. Textual voice is not subordinate to representation. At the same time that the novel disrupts mimetic voices and thus calls our attention to them as voices, it insists on its identity as a text. In As I Lay Dying voices (mimetic and textual) are constantly breaking the novel's perceptual "surface" (the print we see, the language we recognize, the speakers we "hear") into unexpected discursive planes, the way a cubist painting shatters representational images so that the painting can assert the image of itself.30 United States Naval Academy Annapolis, Maryland

stitute for the narrative discourse-what Darl is is "spoken" language. We do better, I think, to attend to the textual voice and regard the section headings as chapter titles or as textual division markers. The novel dissimulates the linguistic, nominal status of the headings, presenting them finally as icons to be seen as much as names to be "spoken." The book's title also resists representational accounting. The phrase "as I lay dying" sounds spoken because of the "I" (that most problematical of all shifters). Yet who speaks it, and when? Does Addie Bundren say this? She does "lay dying" for part of the story, and she even "speaks" as a narrator after she has died. But this would make hers the controlling "point of view" or "consciousness" for the entire book, an interpretation this reader at least is not willing to accept. Perhaps Darl says "as I lay dying," since he is the most frequently heard narrator, and his mind does, at times, seem the controlling one in the story. Perhaps it is the "author" who utters the title's phrase-the author is usually the one we hold responsible for a title-but are we willing to allow the "I" to refer to Faulkner, or even to a hypothetical "implied author"? None of these alternatives quite satisfies; it seems preferable to regard the title as a purely visual sign emblazoned on the book's cover, though Faulkner has rendered even this status suspect by making the title appear to be "spoken" from somewhere within the fiction. Faulkner employs italicized print frequently in As I Lay Dying, as he does in other novels. Although occasional words seem to be italicized to indicate vocal stress, the italics normally occur in passages far too long to allow for verbal contrast (we might think here of the italicized fifth chapter of Absalom, Absalom!). Instead,

Notes
1 Barth, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tapes, and Live Voice (New York: Doubleday, 1968),

pp. 131, 167. 2 That we recognize "Menelaus"as a name from an earlier narrative adds, of course, another chamber to Barth's funhouse.
3 Oxford English

Dictionary.

Some other connota-

tions of "voice" include the power of speech and a characteristic way of speaking. Grammatical "voice"

reminds us that "voice" establishes relationships, an implication with which Gerard Genette enriches his narrative theory in Figures 11 (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 225-67. 4 A thorough examination of the polysemy of "voice" as used in critical discourse would necessitate another essay. I list here a few critical works that employ "voice" in some manner important to their central arguments: Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Stephen M. Ross
Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Wayne
Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of

309

Chicago Press, 1974); Norman Friedman, "Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept," PMLA, 70 (1955), 1160-84; rpt. in The Theory

13 A vital distinction between point of view and voice in narrative is developed by Genette in Figures

III. 14 Derrida on Saussure: "The affirmation of the essential and 'natural' bond between the phone and

of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 108-37; Genette, Figures 111; Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975); Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971); Eric Rabkin, Narrative Suspense (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1973); Guy Rosolato, "The Voice and the Literary Myth," in Structuralist Controversy,ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp.
201-14. Norman Page, in Speech in the English Novel

the sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depends expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of the Saussuriandiscourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness" (p. 40).
15 Andre Bleikasten, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying,

(London: Longman, 1973), discusses many issues relating to voice but never uses the word outside quotation marks. These works illustrate most of the important uses (and misuses) of "voice" as a critical term, apart from occasional or purely figurative uses. All these uses (with the exception of Rosolato's) are touched upon in my essay. 5 The term "positive lever" is Jacques Derrida's. See Translator'sPreface to Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. Ixxv.
6 All references are to As I Lay Dying

trans. Roger Little (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 63-64. 16This is especially true for narrators outside the Bundren family or neighborhood. Their more public narratives are in the past tense (the Bundrens' and Tull's vary in tense) and never violate verisimilitude of voice and person. An obvious example of how the narratives are rendered "public" comes when Samson tries to recall someone's name: "'Who's that?' MacCallum says: I can't think of his name: Rafe's twin;
that one it was. . . . 'You better holler at them,' Mac-

(1930; rpt.

New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1964). 7 Genette, "Boundaries of Narrative," trans. Ann

Levonas, New Literary History, 8 (Autumn 1976),

Callum says. Durn it, the name is right on the tip of my tongue" (pp. 106, 107). 17 Wayne Booth makes a similar point about the freedom allowed in portraying consciousness, though he is speaking of "sympathy"rather than "plausibility": "Generally speaking, the deeper our plunge [into a character'smind], the more unreliability we will accept
without loss of sympathy" (The Rhetoric of Fiction

1-13. This is a translation of Genette's essay "Frontieres du recit,"Figures 11 (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 8 The manner in which critics praise dialogue is indicative: "consistently echoes the accepted speech of the day," "there is no line of dialogue from a novel that could not easily be imagined proceeding from the mouth of an actual person," and "the dialogues ... could not reproduceactual speech more faithfully, and more unselectively, if they had been transcribedfrom a tape-recorder." These are quoted by Page, p. 3. 9See David Hayman and Eric Rabkin's discussion of the "untrustworthy narrator"in Form in Fiction: An
Introduction to the Analysis of Narrative Prose (New

[Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 164). p. 161.

18 Bleikasten, p. 64, and Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction,

19 Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, Literary Terms: A Dictionary (rev. ed. of A Reader's Guide to Literary

Terms, 1960; New York: Noonday, 1975), p. 181. The original version did not contain "voice." In the title of a recent article Daniel R. Schwarz uses "voice" (apparently meaning "author'svoice") in a manner implying that all readers will understand the term in the same way: "Speaking of Paul Morel: Voice, Unity,
and Meaning," Studies in the Novel, 8 (Fall 1976), 255-77. 20 Foucault, "What Is an Author?" Partisan Review, 42 (1975), 610. See also The Archaeology of Knowl-

York: St. Martin's, 1974), pp. 73-77.

10 See Joseph Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation

(1785; facsimile rpt. ed. R. C. Alston, Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1969), pp. 100, 147. 11Such a brief example does not do justice to the flexibilityof the novel's vernacular.Even within a single narrative section the same character'sspeech may vary slightly. "Hit" for "it" and the dropping of "g" from "ing" are the most noticeable variations. The manuscript of As I Lay Dying (housed at Alderman Library, Univ. of Virginia) shows that Faulkner deleted "hit" from many passages of dialogue and added it in others. 12 See R. W. Franklin, "Narrative Management in
As I Lay Dying," Modern Fiction Studies, 13 (Spring 1967), 57-65, and Peter Swiggart, The Art of Faulk-

edge, trans. A. M. SheridanSmith (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 92-95. 21 I paraphrase Calvin Bedient, who says that one reason the novel seems so mysterious and "contains no explanations"is that there is no "organizerbehind the spectacle" of events. "There is thus in the novel a fundamental silence that is truly terrible" ("Pride and
Nakedness: As I Lay Dying," Modern Language Quar-

ner's Novels (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1962), pp. 61, 70.

terly, 29 [March 1968], 62). 22 The term "context"is also used to denominate one aspect of verbal signification: a word's significationcan be determinedby the words with which it appears.This kind of verbal context is not part of the paralinguistic context I am referring to. 23 Punctuation is sometimes on the border line be-

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

310

"Voice" in Narrative Texts

Fury (esp. in the Quentin section) than in As I Lay
Dying.
28 We might also include the unusual variations in tense (in the narrative discourse), most of which do not affect the time of narration. These are, however, verbal changes with no special visual status, so I hesitate to include them as part of textual voice. See my discussion of the tense changes in "Shapesof Time and

tween textual and mimetic voice. We can signal a "question" orally with a rising pitch at the end of a sentence; we can indicate it verbally through word order; we can mark it in a text with "?" The oral and textual markings both can function without the verbal; each is part of its respective kind of voice. To the extent that quotation marks indicate the "re-presentation" of spoken words, they are part of mimetic voice; to the extent that they bracket a word or phrase to give it special status, to call attention to it, they belong to textual voice.
24 25

Consciousness in As I Lay Dying," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1975), 723-37.
29 Virginia Woolf uses precisely this technique of introducing interior monologue with conventional speaker identification: "'The purple light,' said Rhoda,

Author's Note to Lost in the Funhouse, p. ix. Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph

Blotner (New York: Random, 1977), p. 44. 26 John Hollander has written about poetry (and not merely "experimental"poetry) as for the ear and
for the eye: Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of

'in Miss Lambert's ring.

.'"

(The

Waves [New

Poetic Form (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). 27 Experiments with punctuation, etc., are more frequent and more complicated in The Sound and the

York: Harcourt, 1931], p. 34). The effect is to make the monologues much closer in status to imitated speech. 30 I am grateful for the assistance I received, in completing this essay, from a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.

This content downloaded on Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:23:14 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions