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A little seven minute aperitif on the voices at an author’s disposal when writing. Also, satire.

Would you say I have a distinctive ‘voice’ when I write? What’s my style? What sort of narratives do I tell?

This semester at St. Andrews, a theme’s emerging — the terms we use when talking about fiction are hard to define and distinguish. As in, you need to hold an entire debate to establish them before getting onto the real discussion. (Like theme—but that’s for a future post.)

Take voice. As a first principle, everyone knows that in a story, someone is always speaking – aloud, or otherwise. In Literature, Criticism, and Theory, Bennett and Royle bring this idea to another level when it comes to narration. When they analyse the opening to Raymond Carver’s short story Fat, they make an intriguing argument: not only are we given the first-person voice of the waitress, we’re also being given Carver’s voice as a phantasm. There’s just something about the way this waitress speaks that’s indivisible with the voice of Raymond Carver himself.

Then, in James Woods’ How Fiction Works, he analyses the opening of John Updike’s book, Terrorist. It’s quite the pedestrian scene, until our protagonist, Ahmad, wonders if there’s a ‘next life.’ Here, Woods swears we’ve left Ahmad to eat Updike’s dust — the prose about the Qu’ran’s ninth sura is all the author:

In the year past he has grown three inches, to six feet – more materialist forces, working their will upon him. He will not grow any taller, he thinks, in this life, or the next. IF THERE IS A NEXT, an inner devil murmurs [..]

I didn’t get it, honestly. If Woods hadn’t told me, and I read Terrorist, the ‘authorial flag’ that he claims signals the switch between Ahmad’s POV and the author’s would fly past me. I’d be under the impression that the reflection on the sura is Ahmad’s own. Woods dismisses the idea that an eighteen year-old’s stream of consciousness could jump from thinking about how much he grew in the last year, to the existence of a life after this one: “unlikely,” he writes.

When two old women in a restaurant joke about the small portions, it’s unlikely they’re playing with their food and making a metaphor about life; clearly, that’s Alvy Singer’s doing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPbzP19dlgM

Or maybe I’m not as sharp as Woods. Updike ought to have broken into a new paragraph: “Hi, reader, John Updike here—did you know, in the ninth sura of the Qur’an…? This will be on the test, so please make a note of it.” Then, I’d learn…

By the same token, I wasn’t entirely sure what Bennett and Royle meant by pointing out that the waitress still sounds a little like Carver. Of course she does. He made her up. Maybe it’s like listening to a voice actor doing one of their characters, then their actual voice, and listening for the subtle cadences in the character’s voice that still sound like the actor’s real voice.

Even though Carver made her up, he had to write her dialogue and thoughts in a way that distinguishes her from him, so that when we read “I”, there’s no doubt that this is the waitress telling the story, and not the author.

So maybe I do understand what Woods was getting at. Terry Pratchett does this in Discworld all the time. Reading Discworld through Woods, the question he’s begging might be something like this:

Is the Discworld narrator its own demiurgic entity, who’s so happened to have adopted the voice of a curmudgeonly raconteur? Or, is it just Terry Pratchett? Is the narrator also the author, or are they separate entities?

Bennett and Royle argue that actually, it’s both. The narrator is not the author, but the narrator is the narrator, and the implied author is the narrator, too… I’m not making this any easier, am I?

Look, as far as I understand it, the Author (all flesh and bones, just like you) is the narrator, the character, and the ‘implied’ author (a figment—the author the reader imagines from what is known about the author from the text). The Author is these things, insofar as they are the sole authority over what words get put into the mouths of characters, as well as the narrator, in their manuscript – “the decision-maker during the creative process,” as Dan Olson describes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikJ_b2SCycU

As for the other way around? When Pratchett was asked what Vimes got up to in-between Jingo and The Fifth Elephant, he said:

Nothing. I made him up.

He could not answer that question because Pratchett is not Sam Vimes. Neither is Pratchett the narrator. He’s not even the narrator’s footnotes. He’s just the name on the cover, a wrapper around the text within, or a collage of creative contributions. Like I’ve said – if you think you’re seeing Terry Pratchett emerging from the pages of Discworld, you’re not. You’re seeing the ‘implied’ Terry Pratchett.

Are you still confuckled? To be honest, so am I. Ursula Le Guin made a simpler argument in Steering the Craft: in narrative nonfiction, like personal essays, “I” is the most common pronoun, and exclusively refers to the author; in fiction, the voice of a text is either from a character’s POV, or is the author’s. No mucking about with implied authors and suchlike.

Le Guin’s advice might be good enough for us writers, but it’s a model too simplistic for literary theorists. I like its simplicity, but I think there’s one particular kind of genre that, for it to work, requires knowledge that the person speaking both is and isn’t the author.

I’m referring, of course, to satire.

Let’s think about Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. Why is his suggestion of selling babies for the rich to eat funny? Well, like a double act, the text can be read completely straight, or completely ironically, and both interpretations of the text play off each other. As Bennett and Royle write:

Our understanding of a text is pervaded by our sense of the character, trustworthiness and objectivity of the figure who is speaking […] The narrator appears to make his proposal seriously but we necessarily conceive of an ‘implied author’ who has very different views and motives, and who is making a political point about the immorality of the English government in its attitude towards poverty in Ireland.

If Le Guin’s simple model was, instead, an objective truth, there’d be no way for Swift, the Author (the flesh-and-blood Swift) to ironically distance himself from what his narrator is suggesting. There would be no implied author; and Swift, a sicko of his day, would be no more than a minor footnote in a Channel 5 schlockumentary on cannibalism.

(Good thing that models are, by definition, lossy processes that drop details; we’d like to take the whole wide complex world in two hands, but to come to new insights, we end up having to simplify. This is probably what Le Guin intended when writing that chapter in Steering the Craft, and, as my tutor pointed out, she wouldn’t have opposed the nuance in Woods’ theories on voice.)

Because we can distinguish these authorial voices, satire is rendered all the funnier when a large number of readers don’t get the joke. Some of The Onion’s article are stonkers on their own, but when they attract enough people who take them at face value, it’s a whole new level:

https://old.reddit.com/r/AteTheOnion

But I think this tangent on satire is where I get off. I can at least say I’ve thought this through now. But I just want to get back to writing, for fuck’s sake.

TTLY…

Oh fuck

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Get These (Authorial) Voices Out Of My Head is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Use it however you like, even commercially, so long as you attribute it to me, bm, and link back to this original article.