Narrative Voice: Chapter from a Novel-in-Progress
by Jacob Russell on December 08, 2007
I can never complete a work until I am sure of the voice. I’ve been so close for so long with this novel--gone from 3rd person to 1st to close third and back; alternated the voice chapter to chapter. Nothing that quite works. Here, at last, I think I’ve found the middle ground, a voice that speaks from the interstitial space between the reader and the fictive world it evokes, participant in both, belonging to neither.
Ari Figue’s Cat
Book IV: Ch. 30
Missing Persons
At first we couldn’t find the light--greeted by a long tunnel of a room, open stairway to a loft-like second floor--watery green the sun that filtered through a skylight draped with a sagging batik sheet; milky blue the light rippling through the glass bricks. The door left open the better to see. Inspected the shadowy forms stacked shoulder high along the walls. In rows, forming corridors, branching passageways, dead ends--a maze of boxes, transfer files, chairs and tables piled high with books.
You’ll have to pull the switch at the box, she says. I think it’s under the stairs.
Particles of dust stirred to life by our entrance dance in narrow shafts of sun penetrating the spaces in the flooring from the loft above.
What is all this stuff? Gazing in amazement--lost in a reverie of shadows--his voice gives Naomi a little start.
What do you see? I haven’t been here in quite some time.
Boxes. Lots of boxes. He stands there, this letter in his hand from Sorrel. My mind is anyplace but here in this room, like someone swimming under water, starved for breath, I long to break surface, to face the sun of living day.
Yours? he asks.
By default. The burden of possession without ownership. Left to me without will or testament.
Someone who died?
Someone I know--or thought I did. Not well, it turned out.
A friend?
An acquaintance.
There were no relatives? No one to claim her things?
Her? I don’t recall that I made reference to sex.
He must have Wren in mind… or is it Sorrel, whose letters are in his back pocket?
I’m sorry.
Don’t be. It was a long time ago. The cause for sorrow has long since passed. It’s an odd thing, isn’t it? He might well have died. After almost twenty years. One would have been justified to have accepted the possibility.
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Quotation marks are a printers convention. I’ve abandoned them in stages. For a while, I used a modified French system: Em-dash without the guillemots. In time, even the dashes restricted the reading beyond what I found acceptable.
Quotation marks are artificially restrictive, and deadly if you have any inclination to observe and leave evidence for the many layers of mental activity that mediate between an explicit speech act meant to be heard by another character, and a purely internal voice--one that may not even be entirely acknowledged by the mind in which it occurs. For everything but explicit speech you have to resort to stage directions.
He mumbled under his breath. He thought to himself. She said, or thought she said… without being sure he heard what she intended. She thought, as soon as the words were out her mouth.
This is the narrator telling the reader how to read. I find it insulting.
In a film scriptor play, the actor fills in the lacuna. So do good readers if you don’t treat them as infants. Sometimes you hear what another character has said like an echo in your own mind.
I prefer to use a minimum of directions. He says, she says. Not so much to point out the explicit speech, as to warn the reader to be on the alertfor shifts from open speech to internal monolog, reflexive afterthoughts, words perhaps spoken, but not as dialog meant to be heard, semi-conscious associations. I also want to include the narrator in the scene--sometimes as projection of a character’s thoughts, sometimes to throw the meaning in doubt, to open the interpretative possibilities.
If you pay the slightest attention to how your mind works in a conversation you will see that most of what happens, happens entirely outside of anything you could include in those silly little printer’s signposts. Minimalism is one way to get at this, like Josipovici--I’m thinking of In a Hotel Garden, where the speech is so enigmatic, so stripped of background and stage direction, that it remains open for the reader.
I’m not a minimalist. I have to go about it by other means.
– Jacob Russell (12/09 at 9-Dec 12:48 -05:00)
I appreciate you responding at length regarding this. Obviously you must writeas you see fit. That said I can’t help being the reader that I am. I respect an intelligent reader but I don’t see the point in making all the other readers’ lives difficult. I do have to say that my inclination is to include rather than exclude. Perhaps it comes from writing music were you can command everything and yet there is still room for personal interpretation.
I do agree that your little paragraph in italics is awful. Personally I rarely use expressions like “he thought” – I just writethe thoughts but it can get complicated. Without wanting to labour the point further – I have no axe to grind here, merely an opinion for what it’s worth – but here is an example of my own writing where the narrator (Jim) inserts his thoughts into the old man’s speech which itself includes the old man’s thoughts. I’m sure I could rewriteit but, to my mind, the punctuation does what it’s suppose to do, makes it clear who is talking and who is thinking:
“I used to do a bit of writing back in the old days...” (The old guy was off again but this time he’d snagged Jim’s interest; that wasn’t supposed to happen) “...mind you, it was a while ago and, when I caught sight of you across the pond there I thought to myself, Self, if that’s not someone at the end of a long and intense relationship then I guess it’ll pretty much have to be a bloke with the world’s worse case of writer’s block.” Who was this guy? “You know, I suppose being God’s not much different from being a writer. He creates characters and watches how they work together and every now and then he has to butt in and do a bit of editing, fix a name here or there, kill off some minor character to free up the plot a bit.” Oh dear, why did he have to go and spoil it all and bring God onto the scene?
– Jim Murdoch (12/09 at 9-Dec 13:52 -05:00)
What does that mean, “making things clear” for the reader--if not pandering to their expectations? Giving them reassurance for their received notions, helping them settle into their comfort zone?
We use, and need, narratives to feel at home in the world.
Narratives lie. They deceive us, and the conventions they are constructed from become the tools of power for those who would manipulate us--who would give us false comfort in return for our freedom, our work, our lives.
No way around the contradiction. We need narratives. Narratives lie.
No way out, but to make the contradiction part of the structure--to treat artifice for what it is, refusing to dole out comfort by blurring the distinction between artifice and the unrepresentable Real.
I like what Mark Thwaite said on Ready SteadyBooks, writing on Josipovici and Establishment Literary Fiction.
In this week’s TLS there is an abridged version Gabriel Josipovici’s lecture What Ever Happened to Modernism? (which I heard Gabriel give in London, back in March, as did Stephen Mitchelmore and Ellis Sharp).
The lecture, and now the essay (which I’m afraid isn’t online), made me think again about Establishment Literary Fiction (ELF). It isn’t that ELF is bad. Some ELF is good. And certainly much of it is very good indeed at being ELF! But since Modernism, and again since Modernism’s questions were re-articulated by the writers of the nouveau roman — especially, then, for those who see the novel as a mode of enquiry or, better, a mode of discovery — ELF seems to me to be the embodiment of Bad Faith. It manifests a willing refusal to acknowledge that the questions that Modernism posed even exist (or that the novel might be a place to inquire about their answers).
Therefore, ELF endlessly repeats the tropes and styles of the Victorian Novel, with its fingers in its ears, shouting its (sometimes very good) narrative, flaunting its (sometimes very finely drawn) characters, refusing to be interrogated and refusing to recognise its own structural ressentiment.
– Jacob Russell (12/09 at 9-Dec 14:22 -05:00)
I see where you’re coming from and you have valid points. My favourite author is Samuel Beckett who deliberately made his later writing vague and I have no problems with his reasons for doing that. I’ve just struggled through one of Pinget’s novels and it certainly does the reader no favours. I just can’t writelike that. My wife does. All her poetry rests on ambiguity. She doesn’t use capital letters hardly or any punctuation. You will not believe the discussion we had when I used a semi-colon in a poem of half-a-dozen lines.
Nothing I have said is a criticism. I hope you realise that. I was just curious.
BTW my second comment isn’t showing up. It would help if it was there so readers can make more sense out of your last response.
– Jim Murdoch (12/09 at 9-Dec 14:50 -05:00)
Jim wrote: <blockquote>I see where you’re coming from and you have valid points. My favourite author is Samuel Beckett who deliberately made his later writing vague and I have no problems with his reasons for doing that. I’ve just struggled through one of Pinget’s novels and it certainly does the reader no favours. I just can’t writelike that. My wife does. All her poetry rests on ambiguity. She doesn’t use capital letters hardly or any punctuation. You will not believe the discussion we had when I used a semi-colon in a poem of half-a-dozen lines.
Nothing I have said is a criticism. I hope you realise that. I was just curious.
</blockquote
What’s wrong with criticism? I have no problem with that--giving or receiving.
Your focus on “difficulty” misses the point. It’s not about difficulty, as such. It’s about using common coin conventions, pandering to the status quo and what that means. It seems to me that contributing to public complacency, soothing readers in their delusions--in our new imperial reality, amounts to willful complicity in massive crimes against humanity.
– Jacob Russell (12/09 at 9-Dec 15:19 -05:00)
I prefer using the first voice because I usually give my characters something from my experience. I tried using the third but I couldn’t be as altruist as I should have and turned it into first as well.
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Mary-Anne Davis, Arizona web design CEO by day, writer by night.
– Mary-Anne Davis (04/14 at 14-Apr 12:25 -05:00)
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I’m having a similar problem with my own novel. My problem is I keep drifting into dialogue, pages and pages of dialogue.
I read over this piece several times but I kept stumbling over the lack of quotes. I’ve read books before that dispense with them and I’ve never understood what the author hopes to gain by dropping them.
– Jim Murdoch (12/09 at 9-Dec 11:36 -05:00)