Unnatural Voices

1. Introduction: Transgressing Self and Voice - Contemporary Fiction and the Death of the Narrator

• Two main features stand out in the development of fictional technique since Defoe:
  • The exploration of subjectivity (beginning with Sterne's play with unexpected association of ideas and continuing with Jane Austen's development of free indirect discourse).
  • The rise of the unreliable narrator, which had been present in epistolary fiction and gained new prominence by the time Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground" (1864) appeared. In addition, narrative fragmentation and unexpected reconstructions. One goes from unreliable narrators to incompetent ones to delusional and then completely insane storytellers. On starts with flawed narration, goes on to more fragmented forms, and ends with the semi-coherent and utterly opaque.
• The nature and identity of the narrator becomes itself a miniature drama as a familiar narrating situation is established thoughout the text only to be utterly transformed at the end. The heterodiegetic narrator outside the story turns out to have been in there all along, the seemingly daring narrative "you" is instead a more conventional apostrophe, the story of another is revealed to be the story of oneself. The conventional practice is deployed until it is turned inside out, revealing the artificiality of a perspective, whether designated "third person" or "heterodiegetic", that can be so easily inverted. And the move is always away from traditional objectivity and omniscience, from the third person to the first.
• There is a general move away from what was thought to be "omniscient" third person narration to limited third person narration to ever more unreliable first person narrators to new exploration so "you", "we", and mixed forms. There is a similar movement from the psychological novel to more impressionistic renderings of consciousness to the dissolution of consciousness into textuality, and a corresponding move from human-like narrators to quasi-human, non-human, and anti-human speakers, as the figure of the narrator as a recognizable human being recedes into an ever greater eclipse

2. "At First You Feel a Bit Lost": The Varieties of Second Person Narration

• Second person narration is an artificial mode that does not normally occur in natural narrative or in most texts in the history of literature before 1919. It is an extremely protean form, and its very essence is to eschew a fixed essence
• The Standard Form - A story is told, usually in the present tense, about a single protagonist who is referred to in the second person; the "you" often designates the narrator and the narratee as well, though there is considerable slippage in this unusual triumvirate.
  • These sentences could have been written in the first person, in the third person with a single focalizer, or in free indirect speech. Instead, the second person was chosen, and a different type of narration follows, one which approximates but cannot be reduced to any of these other perspectives.
  • A continuous dialectic of identification and distancing ensues, as the reader is alternately drawn closer to and further away from the protagonist. This you is inherently unstable, constantly threatening to merge with the narratee, a character, the reader, or even with another grammatical person.
  • The second person is a playful form, original, transgressive, and illuminating, that is always conscious of its unusual own status and often disguises itself, playing on the boundaries of other narrative voices.
  • Even in her own consciousness, the narrator of Edna O'Brien's "A Pagan Place" views herself as a peripheral figure, a passive and largely inconscquential bystander. To refer to herself as an "I" would take more temerity than she possesses. Her subjectivity is muted, diffused, collapsed. Her "you" expresses her distance from her self.
  • The choice of second person radically alters the tone of the work and provides a unique speaking situation for the narrator, one that does not occur in natural narratives and consequenlty one that continuously defamiliarizes the narrative act. Its usage can engender a heightened engagement between reader and protagonist in different directions: we may oppose identification with a "you" we resist, or we may sympathize more fully with them.
• The Hypothetical Form - In Lorrie Moore's "Self Help", we see consistent use of the imperative, frequent employment of the future tense, and the unambiguous distinction between the narrator and the narratee. The protagonist is a possible future version of the narratee, though it soon takes on an independent, parallel existence.
• The Autotelic Form - The direct address to a "you" that is at times the actual reader of the text and whose story is juxtaposed to and can merge with the characters of the fiction.
  • In McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City", the reader knows that he or she is extradiegetic, outside the narrative, and only assume identity with the main character as part of the act of play in which reading consists.
  • Italo Calvino's sophisticated stategy in "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller" is to catch you, the extradiegetic reader, off guard, and make you the subject of diegesis, thereby spiriting or abducting you into the narrative.
  • When Calvino goes on to observe, "Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost", the locution may simultaneously refer to all the different readers (narratee, implied, and actual) that traditional narratology attempts to keep separate in theory as well as a character called the Reader. At the same time, it both alludes to and enacts the anti-essentialist stances concerning personal identity characteristic of poststructuralist theory and postmodern narrative. In this work, literature and theory interanimate each other, the concept of person dissolves, and presentation fuses with representation.
• The narrative "you" is admirably suited to explore:
  • Suppressed subjectivity and silenced speech
  • The mind of a conflicted individual in the process of making significant decisions that he would prefer not to have to think about
  • The act of reading even as it is taking place.
  • Commercial discourses intended to exploit their readers through the illusion of identification
  • The mental battles of an individual struggling against the internalized discourse of an oppressive authority
  • Foregrounding a subjectivity typically excluded from common, unexamined notions of "you" and "us".
  • The unstable nature and intersubjective constitution of the self.

3. Class and Consciousness: "We" Narration from Conrad to Postcolonial Fiction

• In Conrad's "The Nigger of the Narcissus", there is no single, self-consistent discursive subject in the text. We need to ask, "What is the narration doing now?" rather then, "Who is speaking here?" By following out the varied narrative voices, however, we find that they themselves constitute a kind of narrative that complements and underscores the central events and ideas of the story.
• Nathalie Sarraute's "Tu ne t'aimes pas" is a representation of a collection of contiguous voices, some of them contradictory, that seem to form a single, decentered consciousness.
• Zakes Mda (in "Ways of Dying"): "We know everything about everybody. We even know things that happen when we are not there; things that happen behind people's closed doors deep in the middle of the night. We are the all-seeing eye of the village gossip. When in our orature the storyteller begins the story, "They say it once happened...," we are the "they"."
• The "we" glides between the lone individual and the entire collective; between a strict and a more lax denotation; and between mental experiences that are entirely, partially, or minimally shared.
• It is most useful to see the "we" narrator as a different kind of figure from the realistic type of first person narrator and more like a postmodern first person narrator who is not bound by the epistemological rules of realism.
• Whereas most second person narration ascillates between these two poles (of 1st and 3rd"), "we" narration curiously occupies both at once.

4. I etcetera: Multiperson Narration and the Range of Contemporary Narrators

• EM Forster: "A novelist can shift his viewpoint if it comes off, and it came off with Dickens and Tolstoy. Indeed this power to expand and contract perception (of which the shifting viewpoint is a symptom), this right to intermittent knowledge: - I find it one of the great advantages of the novel-form, and it has a parallel in our perception of life. We are stupider at some times than others; we can enter into people's minds occasionally but not always."
• In Christine Brooke-Rose's "Thru", the novel repeatedly reverses the hierarchy or narrative levels, transforming a narrated object into a narrating agent and vice versa. The very distinction between outside and inside, container and contained, narrating subject and narrated object, higher and lower level collapses, resulting in a paradox which the text itself puts in a nutshell; "Whoever you invented invented you too."
• In Beckett's "The Unnameable", the narrative voice often refers to other characters and voices which it then discloses to be fictions invented by itself, as apparently independent persons are collapsed into a single narrative voice. On the other hand, the same narrator goes on to claim to have invented the frustrated narrators of other novels written by Beckett; the narrator of The Unnameable here seem to be impersonated its author. This narrative strategy does not merely problematize conventional theoretical distinctions, but undermines the very terms upon which such distinctions rest.

5. Three Extreme Forms of Narration and a Note on Postmodern Unreliability

• Though Karen Lawrence uses the term "narrator" for ease of reference, she prefers "the concept of consciousness or mind of the text, since Joyce does everything possible in the "Ithaca" chapter of Ulysses to destroy our sense of a narrating, human voice.
• The concept of a narrator implies a certain minimal discursive consistency that many late modern and postmodern authors reject; we should have a place for shifting, depersonalized, multivoiced texts that transcend or traduce the sensibility of a single narrator, a composite figure we may refer to as the "incommensurate narrator".
• On the one hand, narrators may resemble actual people who tell stories; on the other hand, there may be no "they" there - with postmodern fiction, we often have mere discourse that unconvincingly occupies the space of a standard narrator. It is this rejection of the personified narrator that the figure of the interlocutor finally reveals.
• In Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, the denarration is global and undermines the world it purports to depict; very little (if anything) is left over after the assaults of textual negation the narrative performs upon itself. These texts emphasize the "performative nature" of all narration.
• It is the first person form of the denarrated that is generally most prevalent and, I believe, more compelling. I suspect this is because it invites more possible interpretive positions concerning the subjectivity of the narrator, as the reader wonders whether the narrator is incompetent, disoriented, devious, or insane. And, when an especially contradictory line appears, it comically throws all of these conceptual frames into disarray, as the entire mimetic framework of the narration is abruptly called into question.
• All that is left for the narratologist to work with is the discourse, since all we know is the sequence in which the dubious events are presented or negated. At this point, a fundamental distinction at the foundation of modern narrative theory breaks down. Here, the usual separation between story and discourse collapses, and we are left with discourse without a retrievable story. The work's discourse is determinate; its story is inherently indeterminable.
• With solipsistic narrators, seemingly disparate narrative voices turn out in the end to be mere projections of a single isolated consciousness. See, for example, Beckett's "Company".
• The other, opposite tactic is the uncanny and inexplicable intrusion of the voice of another within the narrator's consciousness. I call such a figure a "permeable narrator". Unlike the solipsistic gambit, which is readily situated within existing theories of narration, this other movement threatens to violate the principle of an autonomous, individual consciousness that is presupposed by all current theories of the narrator.
• The Unnameable emerges as one of the most defiantly anti-narrative works ever composed, in which al the basic elements of storytelling are negated. There is no determinable temporal or spatial setting, no characters to speak of, no events worth narrating, and no clear audience or motive for the narration. The main engine of the text is the compulsive voice that will not stop, and the primary drama of the text is the determination of the identity of the narrator and its voices. It provides one of the most extreme, fascinating, and outrageous demonstrations of the possibilities of narration in - and only possible in - a work of fiction.
• Many postmodern narrators and voices have superseded the traditional figure of the narrator as a person who is telling a story and who is subject to the normal abilities and limitations of a human being or humanlike narrating agent:
  • The fraudulent narrator - who cannot possibly know what they know.
  • Contradictory narrators - leading to narrative chaos.
  • Permeable narrators - who merge and blend into one another in impossible ways.
  • Incommensurate narrators - who cannot be the single source of all the voices in the story.
  • Dis-framed narrators - who move from one level of a text to another.