NARRATORS ARE LIKE CATS. They may talk about other people, but the world is mostly about them. Even the omniscient sort tend to be smugly self-involved, for all their appearance as dispassionate observers. Point of view is about which cat is telling the story and whether he’s looking at the world from on top of the rock or under it. Voice is about what sort of cat he is. It’s about word choice and word order, about dropped endings and distance from Her Majesty’s English.
It’s what makes novels worth reading. Or sometimes not.
A few observations need to be made, even if they may seem self-evident. First, you can have more than one voice in the narration of the novel. Figured that one out for yourself already, did you? Then why is it so rarely on display in story anthologies and primers on studying fiction? They tend to speak of “point of view” as if there were only one on display in any given work. We know this to be false, that a novel can have many narrators, that something like Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ostensibly told by Mr. Lockwood, who has arrived on the scene after the events detailed in the novel, is of necessity handed off to Nelly Dean, the only remaining witness to the turbulent times that are the basis for the novel, who can then cite others’ testimony to her. This is hardly a new phenomenon. Brontë has been gone for some little time. It is in the way of tale telling that additional assistance is sometimes required, so from the earliest days of novels, multiple narrators appear, often in quotation marks, as they tell their story to the main narrator.
You see the problem, at least the potential problem? Confusion. Which leads to self-evident point number two: if you’re going to employ multiple voices in a novel, you simply must keep them sorted out. Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? But try it sometime and you’ll find that it’s not that easy to sound like anyone but yourself. And the more voices, the more differentiation required.
One of the more spectacular instances of voice differentiation is Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, in which there are five voices that matter, the four Price sisters—Rachel, Leah, Adah, and Ruth May—who offer the principal narration of events, and their mother, Orleanna, whose troubled, mournful recollections frame the sections of the novel that are then told by the daughters.
Ripe fruits, acrid sweat, urine, flowers, dark spices, and other things I’ve never seen—I can’t say what goes into the composition or why it rises up to confront me as I round some corner hastily, unsuspecting. It has found me here on this island, in our little town, in a back alley where sleek boys smoke in a stairwell amidst the day’s uncollected refuse.
We can sense, even in this short passage, that Orleanna’s description is also a commentary on something else, something that did not stay put in the past, something dangerous, alien, hostile, something that hunts—and haunts—her still. The signs are everywhere: “acrid,” “urine,” “dark,” “things I’ve never seen,” “a back alley,” “uncollected refuse.” She herself is “unsuspecting” as she moves “hastily” in her “little town,” where this huge thing tracks her down, sneaks up on her unaware. Suppose those words tell us anything?
Your honor, it goes to the state of mind of the witness.
Exactly. What we may want to make of that state of mind, what all those words of peril signify, readers will want to decide for themselves, but their presence throughout her narration, in number, is undeniable.
The girls all come from the same place, Georgia in 1959, before arriving in the Congo on their parents’ mad evangelical mission, yet they are distinct because of differences in age and outlook. Even the twins speak quite differently despite being fairly well matched in terms of raw intelligence, largely due to Adah’s physical damage. The hemiplegia she suffered at birth has left her with a damaged leg and a disinclination to speak. In turn, her disability provides her with distance from her obsessed father, unlike Leah, whose identification with him is nearly all-consuming. It has also resulted in some interesting linguistic traits; she is a brilliant thinker with a knack for palindromes and other inversions at both the letter and word level.
Wonk ton o dew.
The things we do not know, independently and in unison as a family, would fill two separate baskets, each with a large hole in the bottom.
The initial inversion of “we do not know” is pure Adah: surprising, almost like language but just off, with no allegiance to the orthography of the original. She breaks words as she will, inserts or removes punctuation to suit her purpose, as in her take on William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow”: “Chickens white beside standing water rain, with glazed wheelbarrow. Red on! Depends much. So?” She omits the articles “a” and “the” without apology and inserts “standing,” not in the original. Her version has a kind of weird logic to it that does not rely on its source material. In her village, for instance, there is red on everything from the soil and the ubiquitous dust, as nearly all the girls comment at one time or another. Her narration differs from Leah’s well-marshaled, conventional prose not by being disorderly but by being intentionally disordered. For Adah, the world is without plan or Planner, the rule-obsessed God of her father, and her response is to offer up language in kind. Yet the seeming chaos of her narration is, ironically, a product of a highly ordered and careful intelligence. The seeming leaps in logic or connection manifest great method in their arranging.
Rachel, at fifteen, is a compendium of teenage slang and malapropisms.
I screamed and kicked the furniture until one whole leg came off the table and threw a hissy fit they could probably hear all the way to Egypt. Listen, what else can a girl do but try? Stay here? When everybody else gets to go home and do the bunny hop and drink Cokes? It’s a sheer tapestry of justice.
There is, of course, a good deal of comedy in Rachel’s narrations, since she’s easily the shallowest of the girls and the most likely to suffer linguistic misadventures of the “tapestry of justice” sort. Yet she is more than the sum of her parts, and here, too, her voice is a reminder. The seemingly generic teenage idiom she employs reminds us of just what has been taken from her when she is ripped away from the high school experience she had expected, like so many others of her generation, to be her birthright. From her, we are reminded of the cruelty and heartlessness of her father’s religious mania, which admits of no personal aspirations or interests except his own.
Ruth May, at five, only understands the things she can touch or can compare to what she already knows. She calls spearmint gum “Experiment gum” and is endearing in her lack of vocabulary.
When I am grown my mother will still have my shoes. She aims to turn them into brown shiny metal and keep them on a table in Georgia with my baby picture. She did it for all the others, even Adah and her one foot’s no-count; it curls up on one side and makes the shoe wear out funny. Even that bad sideways-worn-out shoe Mama saved, so she’ll save mine.
The limitations of a child’s intelligence allow a certain innocent charm to slip into Ruth May’s voice: lacking the word “bronze,” she manages, as best she can, “brown shiny metal” for the baby shoes her mother has bronzed. Yet she is more than a stereotype of the small child, and that shows through, too. She has a kind of directness and bossiness that her sisters all acknowledge. It is Ruth May who breaks the ice with the native children and organizes games and other forms of play, and it is sometimes she who speaks the truths that make the others uncomfortable, as when she remarks quite casually on their father’s violence. These qualities of being forthright and determined come through in her narrative not only with events but with her sometimes brutal honesty. She becomes the spy, as it were, because her age renders her invisible. Comparing herself to the deadly green mamba that can slither along tree branches and remain unseen, she declares that she can go unnoticed and therefore remain out of sight when her parents are having discussions that the other girls would be forbidden to hear.
These five voices, six actually, since a distinctly new one shows up at the end of the novel, share experiences and traits yet remain highly differentiated as speakers grow and mature. Kingsolver reminds us even without saying so outright that we experience life subjectively, that people who live through the same events under the same roof will still have individual responses and recollections, will still be their own persons with their own outlooks. The interplay of the storytelling voices is fascinating in this novel, which no one character could possibly narrate on her own. Even collectively things are left unsaid; not every perspective can be covered. One perspective that is, significantly, not covered is the divine one, and for good reason. The godlike, omniscient narrator would know too much, would reduce sympathy for the individual suffering of the five females in the Price household, and would violate the scale of the novel—for, even with all the vastness of the place and the overwhelming scale of events, this is a profoundly human, private story. Tragedies always are.
The voices we tend to notice are those attached to characters, often the big, boisterous sorts like Bellow’s Augie March or Henderson. We remember Augie’s brassiness, the enthusiasm and sadness of Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, the tight-lipped control and irony of Hemingway’s Jake Barnes. Every novel, however, no matter what the point of view, has a voice—at least one. Omniscience may be the godlike perspective, but that doesn’t mean its voice is that of God. Here’s one such example.
Women, to their glory be it spoken, are more generally capable of the violent and disinterested passion of love, which seeks only the good of its object, than men. Mrs. Waters, therefore, was no sooner apprised of the danger to which her lover was exposed, than she lost every consideration besides that of his safety; and this being a matter equally agreeable to the gentleman, it became the immediate subject of debate between them.
All right, class, discuss. So what sort of person is behind this voice? Slightly old-fashioned (or just old, maybe), given phrases like “being a matter equally agreeable to the gentleman.” Who writes that now? Someone sounding as if they’re not from now, right? Well, what else? He seems pretty well amused. The line about “to their glory be it spoken” seems first of all like something a man would say, so I would posit a male identity, and it seems secondly mildly ironic and jocular. So, too, does the reversal in the last line, where, since the situation was agreeable to both, “it became the immediate subject of debate between them.” Now, that’s just funny. It says, in essence, I’m a man of the world and have seen a few things, and this is one of those sillinesses men and women get up to now and again. If it’s folly, it’s mild, he seems to suggest, and we can forgive it, being men (and women) of the world.
This voice would be just the right sort to a funny and slightly outrageous tale of minor misconduct, something like Tom Jones. Which it is. Henry Fielding chooses this as the voice for telling his masterpiece. It has the advantage of being much like himself, a man who was witty and often cutting in his remarks but with an eye to the public good. Besides being a novelist, playwright, and satirist, Fielding made a career in law, rising to the rank of chief magistrate of London, from which perch he got to observe a good deal of human folly. The novel’s voice captures that view from on high, along with amusement at the foolishness of his fellow mortals. More importantly, however, that voice is the right one for an uproarious tale of improbability and more than a little mischief, and that is what really matters. It’s important that we keep separate the two beings involved in this transaction, the author and the narrative presence he creates. The author is the guy who gets up in the morning and puts brown sugar on his oatmeal. The other is a fictional construct. To help with sorting these two out, Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) offers the notion of the implied author, a creature the real author has chosen to stage-manage the proceedings of a work of fiction. We generally speak of Fielding as “saying” this or that, but it would be more accurate to indicate that Fielding’s implied author says those things. And what his implied author has to say is a hoot.
A hoot, though, is not the right timbre for every voice. Suppose you want to write a very simple fable, a story with a moral and a fairy-tale atmosphere. Fielding’s wordly-wise, lightly amused persona is not your inevitable first choice. Paulo Coelho, in The Alchemist, accordingly strives for a much different sound.
There, in the sand of the plaza of that small city, the boy read the names of his father and his mother and the name of the seminary he had attended. He read the name of the merchant’s daughter, which he hadn’t even known, and he read things he had never told anyone.
This passage is, of course, Alan R. Clarke’s translation and not Coelho’s Portuguese original. Even so, we can glean from it the essentials of the style. The language is very plain. Both nouns and verbs tend to be simple and unadorned by adjectives, adverbs, or figures of speech. Places and people alike tend not to have proper names or, if they do, to have them employed.
We often encounter this plain style in service of overtly moral teaching in fiction, as in the fables of Aesop or La Fontaine or The Little Prince or E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975).
In 1902 Father built a house at the crest of Broadview Avenue hill in New Rochelle, New York. It was a three-story brown shingle with dormers, bay windows and a screened porch. Striped awnings shaded the windows. The family took possession of this stout manse on a sunny day in June and it seemed for some years thereafter that all their days would be warm and fair. The best part of Father’s income was derived from the manufacture of flags and buntings and other accoutrements of patriotism, including fireworks.
Again, we see the simplicity of the language, although this is not quite as stripped down as Coelho’s. The house is as generic as a description could be. No real specifics are offered beyond the color or the “screened porch.” How many dormers or bay windows? We don’t know. It’s a “stout manse,” but that doesn’t really say much, does it? Doctorow doesn’t want us to become lost in surface detail, so he makes it as nonbusy as possible. He is capable of much more elaborate writing and a far richer vocabulary than he utilizes here, so we must consider the strategy that makes him embrace this minimal level of diction. This plain style is appropriate to the fable or parable, since its purpose is to convey story without getting in the way or calling attention to itself. Its simplicity is a ruse, of course, no more automatic or untutored than any other.
Writers are tricky, and never more so than when they appear to be playing no tricks at all. Here, then, is a way of thinking about how writers use voice, the Law of Hearing Voices: The narrative voice in a novel is a device invented by the writer. Always. Everything about a novel is made up, even when based on reality. A main character may look and act like the novelist’s brother, but it is not his brother. The narrative voice may sound like the author or like someone she knew. It is, nevertheless, a creation selected to best tell the story. The writers may not even have to think about it. The stories they make up may flow so smoothly from the available voices that little conscious planning is required. Such happy coincidence, however, doesn’t change the fact that the voice, like the story, is invention. It only means that invention is pretty close at hand for this writer with this book.
You will notice, for instance, that many writers sound pretty similar from book to book. Henry James in The Portrait of a Lady (1881) is not that far removed from the James of The Wings of the Dove (1902). D. H. Lawrence’s narrative voice varies little from book to book, perhaps only becoming more hectoring in the later novels of the 1920s. On the other hand, even when similarities are strong, writers sometimes display considerable range. Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936) are both clearly by William Faulkner, for instance, yet they sound quite distinct from one another. The former book is much more open, much less crabbed than the latter, whose narrative voice falls all over itself in a torrent of verbiage.
The man apparently hunting out situations in order to flaunt and fling the apelike body of his charcoal companion in the faces of all and any who would retaliate: stevedores and deckhands on steamboats or in city honky-tonks who thought he was a white man and believed it only the more strongly when he denied it; the white men who, when he said he was a Negro, believed he said it to save his skin, or worse: from sheer sexual perversion; in either case the result the same: the man with body and limbs almost as light and delicate as a girl’s giving the first blow, usually unarmed and heedless of the numbers opposed to him, with that same fury and implacability and imperviousness to pain and punishment, neither cursing nor panting, but laughing.
This is the voice not of the third-person narrator but of Rosa Coldfield, who becomes the principal narrator of the story. The impersonal narrator is equally voluble, with phrases like “augmenting and defunctive twilight” and “retroactive overcoming of primary inertia” arranged in a tumble of clauses and phrases, although he is less emotional. Rosa, in addition to being unthinkingly racist in the way of her time and place, as in the “apelike body” description, is living through events from many years earlier as if they just happened, and their vividness gives her narration a slightly hysterical tone. The verbs—“flaunt,” “fling,” “retaliate,” “cursing,” “panting,” “laughing”—are active and sharp, the nouns frequently long and Latinate—“implacability,” “imperviousness”—but also strong and clear, as in “stevedores,” “deckhands,” and “honky-tonks.” And the punctuation! What punctuation! There’s a reason Hemingway so rarely resorts to colons and semicolons: Faulkner took them all. And one other thing you might notice here is sentence structure. Hand this in to your freshman writing teacher and expect to get it back marked “fragment—see me.” Faulkner writes the world’s longest sentence fragments (in fact, this one isn’t close to his record), sentences that eschew a main verb altogether or opt for a participle (“hunting,” in this case) where the main verb should be.
It also goes the other way, though. A few writers can sound incredibly different from one book to the next, even within books. Jane Smiley creates a host of voices in Ten Days in the Hills (2007), her recreation of Boccaccio’s Decameron. In addition to the third-person narrator, the novel features ten characters telling a phalanx of stories over ten days, a veritable orgy of narrative to go with the other orgy in the narrative. She’s like Boccaccio in that as well. In such a structure, it is absolutely necessary to make every voice distinctive. Her characters, although largely drawn from the same class, differ by age, gender, race, national origin, and region, and their language differs by vocabulary, sentence structure, rhythm, and tone. They each, in other words, have their own sound. Edna O’Brien accomplishes much the same thing in her searing In the Forest (2002), a tale following the case of three horrific murders, which could be called, after Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Murderer. A central narrative presence periodically hands the story off to various characters, including one of the victims and the killer himself, who come from very different backgrounds and psychological places. From the beginning of her career, in The Country Girls (1960), O’Brien has specialized in finding distinctive and appropriate narrators to carry her storylines, and this late novel makes perhaps the finest use of varied voices, because of the communal nature of the tragedy, of any of her works. These two writers go a bit beyond Wuthering Heights perhaps, in the number of speakers combining on a narrative, but the impetus is largely the same, to find the best way of telling a story and the best voices to carry it along.
So why should we care about all this?
Depends. Does it matter to you with whom you spend the next sixty or eighty or two hundred thousand words? Sometimes at the bookstore, you’ll open a novel, read a page or so, and decide, right then and there, that this narrator is not for you. Too erudite, too low-brow, too smarmy, whatever. You just can’t take that voice for five hundred pages. Or you find yourself absolutely mesmerized by a voice in the first paragraph and you have to have that novel. Ever had that happen? I have. Both ways.
But here’s a more significant reason: voice is meaning. What a narrator says and how he says it changes the story being told. Can you imagine Huckleberry Finn without Huck telling it? Might as well ask if you can imagine the book without him in it. Or Pride and Prejudice without that knowing, arch, amused narrative intelligence. Austen could have told the book with a straight face, no smirk, but I don’t believe we would still be talking about it. The stories writers tell are important, but just as important are the means they find of telling them. And that’s plenty of reason to care.