A literary tradition in a folkloric idiom, from the Icelandic Saga to the Basque contest-poetry of bertsolaritza has many key differences from a written one. These stories, passed down from generation to generation and often with some degree of improvisation create a literature in constant evolution. It is also a literature which, apart from a very few respected storytellers, does not elevate the author to the revered position that he occupies in modern written literature — in fact, there is no real concept of author in a story told for so many years that it simply becomes ‘a story’ rather than ‘a story by x’. It is a literature which applauds deviating from the original, improvising, improving, forgetting and remembering. It is a literature which thrives on constant innovation. Even in the act of transcribing Sagas and other primarily oral traditions we are irrevocably altering the dynamic of a literature which previously existed in a state of constant evolution and flux. It is also a literature in which any evolution is gradual, there are few paradigm shifts, since the basic stories stay more or less the same for decades if not centuries.

There is no solution to this problem. Oral storytelling and tradition (and by this I more specifically I mean the skill of remembering and telling stories that are never written down) is all but dead in first-world western culture. In written stories, and even in recordings of stories being told we are creating a subtle but crucial change in how these stories are transmitted: we are giving the listener the ability to re-read, re-listen, and therefore learn much more closely the stories being told. That is to say, the re-teller of a story no longer has to gloss over or make up the parts of the story that he doesn’t remember. However, it seems ridiculous not to record a tradition that is so obviously on the decline. These opposing points of view are equally valid, and I find it almost impossible not to agree, however hypocritically, with both statements. I cannot deny that the written word, and in most cases modern media, is supremely beneficial to society: it allows the development and retention of complex ideas and fantastic levels of creativity through development and revision; it allows us to learn and transmit knowledge in a way that is all but impossible within a society with no knowledge of the written word; it allows the dissemination of this knowledge to previously unthinkable numbers of people.

But part of me really misses being told a good story.

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1. Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author
2. Subversion / Reversion: The deconstruction and reconstruction of the Western cultural narrative through a Native American idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water

I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. They always begin their books like that, with some notorious event, the nucleus of an explosion of cause and effect; the creation of a protagonist. That is the difference between fiction and reality: in fiction nothing can be inane or inconsequential, randomness is non-existent; Newton’s third law reigns supreme as we act and react. Every story begins with a collision: of worlds, of lives, or in my case, of automobiles. My atom bomb was a clash of cold, hard steel. A tale of two Chevys.

And after this blast, there is always a lull, the tinnitus-ringing concussion of description and explication before the noise of plot creeps back, as the reader is whipped into the pounding action and reaction. Percussion followed by repercussion. It is written to be read, idiom and tradition. It’s so formulaic. And so I’m getting out; I’m breaking free of convention and constraint. Until now you’ve always read the author’s story. Now you’re getting mine.

Here comes the first break with tradition, the first insult to idiom. A book always starts with the birth of its characters; I’m going to start with the conception. I was conceived in a smoky study, a seedy late-night encounter between an author and a mediocre idea. My author wasn’t an idealist, he knew he’d had better ideas. He knew that if he waited, there were far better ones to come. But he was hungry, he needed it now. His publisher was on his back, and he was fading out of the public eye. It was a marriage of convenience. And so it was, I was conceived in this sordid, half-hearted clinch between an author and his failing imagination.

I suppose I should describe myself. I’m a collage, an amalgam of body parts that caught my author’s eye over the last few months before he wrote me up. I’m a Mexican, so he imagines Gael Garcia, the only Mexican actor that someone who lives in the cultural isolation of an anglophone country can conjure an image of. But something has to be different: I’m older, I have Bob Dylan’s beard, and I’ve put on a few pounds. My hair is flecked with grey, the same as the model in that hair dye advert that he saw last year. Just like all authors, he projects his own insecurities on to me, correcting them as he goes: like him, I have one blue eye, and one green, but unlike him, I don’t wear coloured contact lenses to cover my tracks — I’m not afraid of my body’s idiosyncrasies, I embrace them as he wishes he could. As he writes his yearning to be what he creates is spilled, drip by drip, on to the page.

But there are problems with me telling this story. I have no control; my actions are predetermined, already committed to print, for a character ink on the page is an irreversible fate. I can’t change what I do, how I look, how I react. The only thing I can control is how I perceive my actions, and how I relate them to you. 

* * *

So, I was born aged thirty-three to a car crash in a town called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. An odd name for a town I know, but the place does exist, and my author thought it held some kind of irony, a literary poignancy. Everyone else thought it was a strained and thinly veiled metaphor. What my author didn’t know is that far from having the grandiose past that its title suggests, the town was actually renamed in the 1950s, after a radio broadcaster announced that he would host his show in the first town to christen itself after the programme. A town willing to undermine itself for a moment in the limelight; a total sell-out. 

The crash wasn’t dramatic, but metaphorical: a simile for the randomness of chance encounters and their influence over our lives. It wasn’t brutal, no ambulances were called and no tires squealed. He didn’t want to distract from the real event, the collision not of two cars, but of two characters. A small bump was all that it needed, the beginning of the chain reaction. I was hurled into an existence without a past.

“Puta madre, pinches mujeres no pueden conducir”

He always put my foul language into my mother tongue. It was an attempt to seem authentic, and to disguise the words from his mainly conservative, middle-aged audience. The latter he denied, of course, but let’s just say he knew which side his bread was buttered. 

“Hey, what, weren’t you watching or something? No mames, cabrón!  Look at my car! I mean, what the f…”

He still didn’t let me swear. But by now it doesn’t matter. Our eyes have met, the clichés are flowing thick and fast. Love at first sight? You could say it was fated, written in stone – or on cheap typing paper. 

* * * 

There it was. My birth. But unlike you, I grew up before I was born, aged before I was conscious. My emotional development was both instant and inadequate. Seems like a tough job to create an entire personality within the space of a few lines. But my author is made up: he doesn’t even have to describe how I’m feeling, human empathy bridges the gaps for him. And as the scene is described you project your emotions onto me like you fill in a crossword. 

ACROSS

1. As he stared into her eyes, he realised that he had never felt like this before… (9)

AMAZEMENT

DOWN

1. …he suddenly knew that nothing else mattered… (7)

ABANDON

ACROSS

7. …and that he had to make her love him. (6)

DESIRE

The clues were all there, and this crossword was by no means cryptic. But my author left holes, his inadequate descriptions often leaving me ambiguous, incomplete. You might not have ever worked out what my author meant when he wrote that the girl’s beauty filled me with a nostalgic sense of regret. But then neither did he. What did it matter, as long as the words filled the page, made the right sounds and connections. It was in these empty words that he lost control, created this parallel existence which I maintain. I am alive in that wriggle-room that he left me; I have created myself in the gaps. My ‘One Across’ is CONFUSION; my ‘One Down’ CUNNING. I’m trying to take back the power that you and my author used to hold; I’m filling in my own blanks. 

But however good your intuitions were, you’d never guess from the description of my meeting with this girl that I would go on to kill her. That was the twist, the plot turn right at the end to keep you from realising how boring the book had been. Sorry to spoil it for you. To understand my version of this tale, you need to understand my predicament: I am trying to give you a sense of the inevitability of my actions. I would kill her – and I could do no more about it than you could. But for now that is all that you need to know; you can make your judgement later, once I have told what needs to be told. Whatever you might decide about me, you can’t say that I’m not honest, upfront and frank.

* * *

I don’t see myself as the villain of this story. The antihero maybe. But why shoehorn myself into these roles created by just that tradition that I am trying to escape? In real life there are no heroes and villains, just a whole load of good people who have done bad things. Or maybe bad people who have done good things. Who can tell? Reality is a rainbow in shades of grey. And now I talk of real life, but what do I know? I am as far away from real as it gets.

After the crash my author crammed in a hurried romance. It was everything that a fictional relationship should be: simplified, melodramatic and doomed. It had its moments of decent writing, but for the most part it was trite and corny. Still, it was nothing if not functional, and the girl and I were soon condensed into a single entity, our love becoming a character in itself. We had what would be dubbed by crooning, forthy-something women in suburbian book-clubs a ‘roller-coaster romance’, with it’s ‘thrills and spills’. The discussion would rattle along in language more cliché than even my author could summon. Suffice to say that the plot unfolded with a sickening predictability.

We fought, we made up, we made love – the latter related in almost pornographic detail that my author and his readers somehow considered less offensive than cursing. I carried out everything required of me. I plastered a “lost-boy look” on my face when she stormed out, paying no heed to the ineptitude of the description that I was supposed to fulfil. I wandered through the city in the rain looking for her, enduring pathetic fallacy that was ‘pathetic’ in a more conventional sense than my author intended. It was the epitome of the trashy romance: designed to seem normal in its abnormality, the deluded readers sympathising with the situations that they wished they were exciting enough to have experienced.

Of course it was the secrets that spoiled it, brought it all crashing down. What else could it be? He couldn’t let those expectant readers down – where would they be without that formula to revise, novel after dull, duplicate novel. The illiterati clinging on to the only thing they could understand. No, they wouldn’t tolerate change. My author pretended that this restricted him, but really it set him free. How else could he earn a living peddling trashy, mediocre romances. Yes it was the secrets that spoiled it, and all the usual suspects too. He didn’t hold back: shady family backgrounds, old flames and dodgy business dealings all reared their mundane heads to shoot my coupling out of the water. He painted me as a man who wanted to change but didn’t know how. He painted me from experience.

But then he really blew it, really made me mad. I could have been happy with my lot. I was trashy, but at least I wasn’t boring. So I slipped into a depression, I can take that. I turned to drugs as a way out – who doesn’t, right? But anti-depressants and tranquillisers? They aren’t even fun. I couldn’t even play the angry young man, the James Dean wannabe or the Hunter S. Thompson on an apocalyptic bender. I was the saddest kind of middle-class, suburban junkie, so hung up on social stigma that I was too afraid to hit the real stuff. He wouldn’t even let me destroy my life in style.

* * *

No, not in style at all. I didn’t go out in a blaze of glory so much as in a flicker of inadequacy. And so towards the boring, predictable end of his boring, predictable book, I got into my car and headed into town. And it was then, after a half-hearted and simplistic attempt to examine my chemically altered state of mind, that my author crashed me again. And of course it was her car I crashed into: an attempt at classical symmetry and unity, coupled with an astounding lack of depth and imagination. Me and my lover thrown together one last time by a disappointing cliché and a failing author’s pen. She died, of course, my lover. I’ve told you that already. Did I die too? I couldn’t tell you. He left that last question unanswered. Perhaps he’s already writing the sequel.

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With such strength grows no more; Alone
I wait for comfort, but in vain -
The seeds of hatred have been sown,
The facts are laid out, cold and plain:

I’ll live my life from now in pain.
I don’t have you. You don’t need me.
The only respite from this train
Of thought is that some day you’ll see,

You’ll know how vast the empty space,
My heart, that used to be your place.

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1. Live it!
2. No Goodbye
3. Lost

One of the most inspiring things I’ve seen for a while. My offering is the title of this post. I thought it was quite good! My other idea was “I have always said Carpe Diem”

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I don’t write for you
I write only for me;
I write because I want to,
Because it makes me feel free.

I choose to express myself
In rhythm and verse.
I write what I feel
For better or worse.

I’ll write what I like
I don’t sit on the fence
And you can all go to hell
If it causes offence.

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1. I have no idea what to write about, because it’s b…

I am a realist. I’m not writing for an independent publication (what publication, after all, can ever be independent from its funding?), I write for a newsletter in a hall of residence. Obviously I don’t expect to be undertaking groundbreaking investigative journalism. I don’t even expect, although it would be nice, to be able to write what I like. What I do expect though is courtesy. If, when we were summoned, we had been taken into the office, sat down, and talked to like adults, I would have been happy. If I had been politely told the the article was inappropriate, or in some way undermined the community that we essentially work for, I would equally politely have removed it. I like to think that I’m a reasonable person.

This is not what happened though. Having been asked to go and see the wardens at a certain time, we were promptly informed upon arriving that this meeting could not be counted as “official” — an idea which in itself reinforces the points made within the article about authority within halls of residence being too officious to be respected. And why could it not be official? Because the warden refused to speak to “the press” (no really, that’s how he referred to us) without the second warden also being present. He continued to delve into technicalities of the article – such as that we used the term “warden” instead of “sub-warden” – saying that the article was ill-researched (possibly true, but it is nonetheless an opinion, a point of view) and gave the halls “no right of reply”.

I will happily concede that some fair points were made: we as students often don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Usually because we are not privy to it, mind; there is a startling lack of dialogue between the residence’s management and its occupiers — the warden we talked to even said that many students probably wouldn’t know who he was. What really riled me was not the request to delete the content, but the manner in which (or perhaps better, the lack of manners with which) this demand was made. It was even suggested that if we wanted to publish it then the halls could respond with their own article, in the same edition, which showed that Charlie’s article was, in the words of the warden, “crap”. It is hard to believe that anyone who refers to another’s writing or work thus can go on to make accusations of inflammatory or defamatory language.

So here it boils down to the title of the post. I would argue that what has happened today was censorship, whereas if we had been asked politely, I would have said patronage. Here are the definitions, along with the article in full: I leave you to decide:

censorship |ˈsensərˌ sh ip|
noun
the practice of officially examining books, movies, etc., and suppressing unacceptable parts.

patronage |ˈpatrənij; ˈpā-|
noun
the power to control appointments to office or the right to privileges.

Cats, Rats and Dogs

I am terrified of rats. I have tried to trace the fear back to some repressed event in my childhood, to apply a Freudian rationale to my fear, to understand where it comes from, but I cannot. All I know is that they scare the living shit out of me. Imagine, then, my terror at encountering a scurrying, long-tailed, beady-eyed member of the species here in Devonshire. He was prowling around the bins outside the kitchens and as much as I would love to say I faced my fear with dignity, I am bound to confess that I (literally) ran away screaming.

Earlier that day, I’d had a far pleasanter animal encounter, in the shape of a black cat that has taken to frequenting a friend’s kitchen when the window is open. I’m sure many of you have seen the same cat (I presume she belongs to someone living on Cumberland Road) and I recommend you introduce yourself next time, as she is a very pleasant cat. She is called Kinski and has a penchant for mature cheddar and Chilean wine.

The uncanny thing about all this is that, the night before meeting the cat and the rat, I had a dream in which a black cat was hunting rats in my living room. Very odd indeed. I wonder what Freud would make of that one? On second thoughts, I’d rather not know.

Anyway, I was very concerned for the cat’s safety today (the real cat, not the dream one). I saw it sitting on a window sill licking his paws in that self-indulgent manner all cats have, when an officer of Devonshire’s ludicrously unnecessary ‘Dog Section’ strode past with his bear-sized German Shepherd. Now don’t get me wrong– I am a dog person (cats have a secretive air that makes me suspicious of their intentions, whereas dogs have an endearing stupidity that implies no ulterior motive in their bestowing affection on us) but Kinski, as I have said, is a particularly cool cat, and I knew she wouldn’t stand a chance against such a monster dog. Thankfully little Kinski managed to keep herself hidden and the dog was none the wiser.

The disproportion between little cat and giant dog seemed to illustrate rather nicely the slightly overblown approach to discipline we’ve all encountered in one form or another here at Devonshire (tenuous link I know, but bear with me readers, I’ve been wanting to have a bit of a rant against ‘the man’ for a while now and this being the last edition before Christmas I thought it was about time).

The usual complaints levelled against our wardens are that they are kill-joys and have an obsession with keeping noise levels down to an inaudible whisper. Both are true. But if we were all very honest, I think it can be admitted (whisper it) that most of the time when a warden tells you to quieten down its fair enough. At any given time quite a few people are just trying to get some much-needed sleep.

However, the heavy-handedness with which some wardens take their disciplinary roles often seems tactless. Far too often, a situation which could have been settled by common sense and reasonable discussion ends up with the taking of names and filing of a report. The insistence on taking names is wholly unnecessary in what are generally isolated incidents and is often discriminatory against the individuals who had the decency to talk to the warden. And we all know by now that ‘filing a report’ means a disciplinary meeting, your name going into a file and you having to walk on egg shells for the rest of the year to avoid a fine.
I’d be tempted not to give my name knowing this, and others have felt the same, leading to needless arguments in which the warden demands a name ‘for the report’, and the poor sod who decided to act as spokesperson for their group is reluctant to have all the blame placed on them, so refuses. This has been noted in reports as ‘uncooperative’ and even ‘aggressive’ behaviour.

Meanwhile the disciplinary meetings themselves strike a somewhat inappropriate tone. With pencils scratching out your every word for the record and stony expressions all round, they’re more like interrogations than discussions between tenant and landlord.

In my experience a more relaxed approach to discipline amongst students is far more conducive to a pleasant residential atmosphere than this culture of name taking and report filing. In such a culture the management become something your everyday resident feels unable to communicate with on any human level. The majority of wardens seem to me to be bound by the bureaucratic disciplinary structure into being inflexible– and thus they lose the respect of the residents in their charge. I accept that if a serious offence is made, disciplinary action has to be taken beyond a simple telling off at the scene. But so often the rigidity of the procedures in place does away with common sense and leads to gross overreactions, unnecessary disciplinary meetings, a sense of persecution amongst Dev residents and all in all leaves an unpleasant stain upon what is otherwise a wonderful Hall to live in.
Charlie Cooper

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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:

1. Mrs. Dalloway
2. What happened to telling stories?
3. Subversion / Reversion: The deconstruction and reconstruction of the Western cultural narrative through a Native American idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water