Voice and Narration in Postmodern Drama

Abstract

In a recent discussion of narrative voice in this journal, Richard Aczel observed: As an entity attributed to (silent) texts, the concept of voice inevitably raises questions of ontology and metaphoricity .... The question of 'who speaks?' in narrative discourse invites the further question of whether texts can really be said to 'speak' at all.1 Such a formulation, though it may well pass unremarked on by most theorists of narration, nevertheless betrays a bias toward the text that leaves unexamined performed narratives that are indeed literally voiced: oral tales and epics as well as spoken narrations in drama, film, video, and performance art. At one level, the answer to Aczel's conundrum is deceptively simple: narrators in texts in basically the same way that narrators speak in oral texts. A person who writes an epic is reproducing a format established by earlier bards who only declaimed their narratives?and an author like Milton, who dictated his epics to his daughters, is presumably situated some where in between these two positions. When he said: all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight, seeing was meant metaphorically, but the telling was literal?and was performed by the very act of its being uttered.2 But if we have solved one problem (a text may in a manner entirely analogous to that in which an oral text is spoken), we have only begun to scratch the surface of the larger issue: voice may be severed from what it speaks?and indeed from itself?in a variety of ways that have been insufficiently explored. The example of Milton suggests some of the complexities and contradictions inherent in the act of performed narration. What happens to the voice once it is read silently rather than heard? Whose voice is speaking (through) Milton: the divine inspiration he claims, or the generic formula he is obligated to repeat? What is the status of the voice in a public reading, either by the author or by another reader? When the text speaks autobiographically, as it does in this passage, does the voice of the narrator merge with that of the author, as autobiographical theory postulates?3 Finally, what happens to the distinction between oral and epics when illiterate bards pause so their words will be accurately transcribed, and Paradise Lost, that most seemingly written of epics, is in fact composed and delivered orally?