"Who is speaking thus?" (Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author')
Write an essay on narrative voice in prose literary texts that seeks to answer Barthes's question, while examining the ramifications of it.
The question of voice within literature is one that has been debated for decades by philosophers and theorists. To seek to answer Barthes’s question, it is essential to first define what is meant by ‘speaking’. Heidegger, in his essay ‘Language’ posits that “We are always speaking”, since everything that we do is defined by language; we think in language, dream in language, even listen and read in language. In an examination of who is ‘speaking’ a narrative, we are therefore not constrained to those who create the narrative in a conventional sense, i.e the author and characters, but also refer to the reader and/or listener. Every linguistic utterance, be it in public speech or private, has a narrative voice. The voice refers the tone, the language used, form and content; in short anything and everything about the utterance itself. Narrative voices in literary texts can take different forms. Essays such as Orwell’s try to put across a point of view that is clearly that of the author, whereas fictional characters can have views of their own, however they might reflect those of the author, and an omniscient narrator is seen as infallible in his knowledge of fictional occurrences. What unites these different voices is the use of the written word to communicate them.
‘Narrative voice’ in literature describes both what is written and what is read. However, whatever is written by the author, it is the reader that makes the final decision about its meaning, and this is reflected in much modernist literature. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses the ambiguities of what is meant by ‘speaking’ to create an uncertainty within her prose. It is impossible, within Woolf’s stream of consciousness style of writing, to say for certain what is thought and what is spoken; a particularly fitting example of this is Sally’s conversation with Peter Walsh at the end of the novel. But the purposeful creation of this ambiguity is a paradox: by deliberately forcing the reader to decide for themselves, modernist writers are trying to enforce a kind of authorial intent.
Contrarily, in Orwell’s essays, there is a clear effort on the behalf of the author to influence the reader’s political conceptions and ideas; that is, Orwell overtly tries to influence the reader’s decision where Woolf does not. In one of his essays Orwell writes about this mixture of literature and obvious political intent with reference to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and at one point distastefully notes that “in his shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself”. Orwell’s examination of who is speaking within this novel relies on the acceptance that the reader will understand what the author intends. Without this assumption any critique of Swift for politicising his novels would be irrelevant, as what the reader understands from the text would have to be disconnected from the author and his ideas. Orwell’s essays differ from this in form; an essayist can ‘legitimately’ give political opinions in their writing, as this is an accepted and conventional form for conveying such ideas.
Genre and conventions therefore play a significant role in how the narrative voice is finally interpreted, or performed. In a novel, each of the characters will express opinions and make judgements, but the reader’s trust in each character will determine how he interprets each character’s specific narrative voice. In James’s The Turn of the Screw, it is possible to interpret the Governess as a mad woman who imagines the ghosts in her obsession with the children’s master, or as a courageous protector of the children’s innocence, or most likely as something in between. James, as Woolf, creates a deliberate ambiguity that forces the reader to decide for themselves. The reader never knows the governess’s name, or of her past; he is detached from her. The reader only sees the events of the novel through her eyes, and so a scepticism is formed: are we to believe the governess’s one-sided view? James has detached the reader not only from himself, but from his protagonist.
Conversely, it seems illogical for an autobiographical text to be completely detached from the intentions of its author; character and author’s voice is united. As Bakhtin posits “Form and content in discourse are one”, how a text is read is affected by both. Orwell’s use of the autobiographical essay form conributes as much to interpretation as his language, imposing upon the reader a sense of reality and truth. The form is yet another thread in the texture of voices that make up a text. Both form and content are inseparable from the narrative. However, as is demonstrated in Orwell’s essays, the reader is still often left to make judgements of the actions within the accounts, and whatever angle the author views it from, the reader is still the final judge. It is true that Orwell, at some points, clearly expects us to judge him – it is impossible to make a statement such as “And afterwards I was very glad the coolie had been killed” without soliciting judgement – but the reader will judge him whether he intends it or not. It is thus the reader alone that is ‘speaking’, or performing, creating themselves as a reader, by reading the text.
J. L. Austin’s essay ‘Performative Utterances’ highlights the existence of certain words which, within specific social conventions, perform the action which they describe. For Barthes, in writing, the “scriptor is born simultaneously with the text”, and so in writing, is performing an action of creating himself as a scriptor. Equally, as the reader is reading (or, for Heidegger, ‘speaking’) the text, they themselves are born. A single, coherent narrative voice exists only as long as the text is being read, the multiple voices (“a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”) uniting into one reading. The simplest examples that there is no need for an author to create the narrative voice are folk tales, or some spanish picaresque novellas such as Lazarillo de Tormes, in which the author is completely unknown. This obviously does not make them any less ‘literature’ than Dickens or Shakespeare, and goes to show that language does indeed “speak”. When Barthes claims that “writing is the destruction of every voice, every point of origin”, he is not denying that these different voices exist, but that in a written text the reader, not the author, finally chooses, or even creates, the narrative voice which they prefer. A text can have no basic meaning, as to each reader its meaning will be different.
However, about whatever and by whosoever a text is written, the final narrative voice is that of the reader. Each individual will interpret a text in his own way, and though this interpretation may be affected by a variety of factors, there can never be any reading other than that which each individual reader forms for himself. A text without a reader exists only as a multiplicity of voices: personal, historical, theoretical, fictional or surreal, and possible to draw together in infinite ways. Equally, a reader exists only as his reading of a text: one cannot claim two readings of the same book without admitting two readers, each reader created by a completely individual set of circumstances. If a person revisits a text from a different point of view, they are obviously a different reader. As each of these readers reads, or better, ‘speaks’ the language of a text he is creating the narrative voice. As each reading is distinct from another, so each is irrelevant; the infinite factors which create one reading cannot be reproduced. The question one needs to ask is not “Who is speaking thus?” but “What matters who is speaking?”
Related posts:
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Subversion / Reversion: The deconstruction and reconstruction of the Western cultural narrative through a Native American idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water
Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author
"Who is speaking thus?" (Roland Barthes, 'The Death of the Author')
Write an essay on narrative voice in prose literary texts that seeks to answer Barthes's question, while examining the ramifications of it.
The question of voice within literature is one that has been debated for decades by philosophers and theorists. To seek to answer Barthes’s question, it is essential to first define what is meant by ‘speaking’. Heidegger, in his essay ‘Language’ posits that “We are always speaking”, since everything that we do is defined by language; we think in language, dream in language, even listen and read in language. In an examination of who is ‘speaking’ a narrative, we are therefore not constrained to those who create the narrative in a conventional sense, i.e the author and characters, but also refer to the reader and/or listener. Every linguistic utterance, be it in public speech or private, has a narrative voice. The voice refers the tone, the language used, form and content; in short anything and everything about the utterance itself. Narrative voices in literary texts can take different forms. Essays such as Orwell’s try to put across a point of view that is clearly that of the author, whereas fictional characters can have views of their own, however they might reflect those of the author, and an omniscient narrator is seen as infallible in his knowledge of fictional occurrences. What unites these different voices is the use of the written word to communicate them.
‘Narrative voice’ in literature describes both what is written and what is read. However, whatever is written by the author, it is the reader that makes the final decision about its meaning, and this is reflected in much modernist literature. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf uses the ambiguities of what is meant by ‘speaking’ to create an uncertainty within her prose. It is impossible, within Woolf’s stream of consciousness style of writing, to say for certain what is thought and what is spoken; a particularly fitting example of this is Sally’s conversation with Peter Walsh at the end of the novel. But the purposeful creation of this ambiguity is a paradox: by deliberately forcing the reader to decide for themselves, modernist writers are trying to enforce a kind of authorial intent.
Contrarily, in Orwell’s essays, there is a clear effort on the behalf of the author to influence the reader’s political conceptions and ideas; that is, Orwell overtly tries to influence the reader’s decision where Woolf does not. In one of his essays Orwell writes about this mixture of literature and obvious political intent with reference to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and at one point distastefully notes that “in his shrewder moments Gulliver is simply Swift himself”. Orwell’s examination of who is speaking within this novel relies on the acceptance that the reader will understand what the author intends. Without this assumption any critique of Swift for politicising his novels would be irrelevant, as what the reader understands from the text would have to be disconnected from the author and his ideas. Orwell’s essays differ from this in form; an essayist can ‘legitimately’ give political opinions in their writing, as this is an accepted and conventional form for conveying such ideas.
Genre and conventions therefore play a significant role in how the narrative voice is finally interpreted, or performed. In a novel, each of the characters will express opinions and make judgements, but the reader’s trust in each character will determine how he interprets each character’s specific narrative voice. In James’s The Turn of the Screw, it is possible to interpret the Governess as a mad woman who imagines the ghosts in her obsession with the children’s master, or as a courageous protector of the children’s innocence, or most likely as something in between. James, as Woolf, creates a deliberate ambiguity that forces the reader to decide for themselves. The reader never knows the governess’s name, or of her past; he is detached from her. The reader only sees the events of the novel through her eyes, and so a scepticism is formed: are we to believe the governess’s one-sided view? James has detached the reader not only from himself, but from his protagonist.
Conversely, it seems illogical for an autobiographical text to be completely detached from the intentions of its author; character and author’s voice is united. As Bakhtin posits “Form and content in discourse are one”, how a text is read is affected by both. Orwell’s use of the autobiographical essay form conributes as much to interpretation as his language, imposing upon the reader a sense of reality and truth. The form is yet another thread in the texture of voices that make up a text. Both form and content are inseparable from the narrative. However, as is demonstrated in Orwell’s essays, the reader is still often left to make judgements of the actions within the accounts, and whatever angle the author views it from, the reader is still the final judge. It is true that Orwell, at some points, clearly expects us to judge him – it is impossible to make a statement such as “And afterwards I was very glad the coolie had been killed” without soliciting judgement – but the reader will judge him whether he intends it or not. It is thus the reader alone that is ‘speaking’, or performing, creating themselves as a reader, by reading the text.
J. L. Austin’s essay ‘Performative Utterances’ highlights the existence of certain words which, within specific social conventions, perform the action which they describe. For Barthes, in writing, the “scriptor is born simultaneously with the text”, and so in writing, is performing an action of creating himself as a scriptor. Equally, as the reader is reading (or, for Heidegger, ‘speaking’) the text, they themselves are born. A single, coherent narrative voice exists only as long as the text is being read, the multiple voices (“a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”) uniting into one reading. The simplest examples that there is no need for an author to create the narrative voice are folk tales, or some spanish picaresque novellas such as Lazarillo de Tormes, in which the author is completely unknown. This obviously does not make them any less ‘literature’ than Dickens or Shakespeare, and goes to show that language does indeed “speak”. When Barthes claims that “writing is the destruction of every voice, every point of origin”, he is not denying that these different voices exist, but that in a written text the reader, not the author, finally chooses, or even creates, the narrative voice which they prefer. A text can have no basic meaning, as to each reader its meaning will be different.
However, about whatever and by whosoever a text is written, the final narrative voice is that of the reader. Each individual will interpret a text in his own way, and though this interpretation may be affected by a variety of factors, there can never be any reading other than that which each individual reader forms for himself. A text without a reader exists only as a multiplicity of voices: personal, historical, theoretical, fictional or surreal, and possible to draw together in infinite ways. Equally, a reader exists only as his reading of a text: one cannot claim two readings of the same book without admitting two readers, each reader created by a completely individual set of circumstances. If a person revisits a text from a different point of view, they are obviously a different reader. As each of these readers reads, or better, ‘speaks’ the language of a text he is creating the narrative voice. As each reading is distinct from another, so each is irrelevant; the infinite factors which create one reading cannot be reproduced. The question one needs to ask is not “Who is speaking thus?” but “What matters who is speaking?”
Related posts: