Voice to Voice: Reflections on the Art of Conversation

Abstract

The idea of voice has certainly come a long way in several decades since it was first introduced into literary studies1?not to mention many centuries since medieval logicians formu lated their distinction between univocal and equivocal terms. After reading contributions to this volume of New Literary History, indeed, one senses a pervasive anxiety that theorizing about and voice may have strayed a little too far from home. Take narratology to start with. Literary humanists who may once have warmed to idea that novelists can create ironic distances by orches trating voices of more or less unreliable narrators are likely to be worried by more recent attempts to treat field of narrative voice if it were an objective datum, whose lineaments can be expected to reveal themselves to scientific narratologists in rather same way that structure of genome has yielded to advances of geneticists. Can we seriously suppose?they will say?that every possible form of narra tive is innately prefigured in structure of literature such? Are we to believe that novelists who have come up with new ways of telling stories are doing no more than stumbling upon methods that were already latent in pregiven nature of narrative? And ought not any decent raconteur to be able to come up with more narrative stratagems than are dreamt of even in most sophisticated and up-to-date narratology? Be that it may, extension of idea of narrative voice beyond comfortable old themes of irony and unreliability has undoubtedly put it under strain, and today's laborers in fields of narratology? well represented here by Richard Aczel, Monika Fludernik, Andrew Gibson, Manfred Jahn and Brian Richardson?evidently find it some thing of an embarrassment. Aczel, fearing that references to voice may have a tendency to tie narratology to some notion of a unified speaker position, conceived as origin, pure self-presence, prefers to think of voice echo or ventriloquism. Meanwhile, Fludernik rejects the voice model altogether, deploring its assumption of the narrator a hypostatized entity, and Jahn points to a general agree ment that talking of in written texts involves a certain amount of