¹ Barth, Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tapes, and Live Voice (New York: Doubleday, 1968), pp. 131, 167.

² That we recognize “Menelaus” as a name from an earlier narrative adds, of course, another chamber to Barth's funhouse.

³ Oxford English Dictionary. Some other connotations of “voice” include the power of speech and a characteristic way of speaking. Grammatical “voice” reminds us that “voice” establishes relationships, an implication with which Gerard Genette enriches his narrative theory in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 225–67.

⁴ A thorough examination of the polysemy of “voice” as used in critical discourse would necessitate another essay. I list here a few critical works that employ “voice” in some manner important to their central arguments: Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Irony (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974); Norman Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,” PMLA, 70 (1955), 1160–84; rpt. in The Theory of the Novel, ed. Philip Stevick (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp. 108–37; Genette, Figures III; Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1975); Gabriel Josipovici, The World and the Book (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971); Eric Rabkin, Narrative Suspense (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1973); Guy Rosolato, “The Voice and the Literary Myth,” in Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 201–14. Norman Page, in Speech in the English Novel (London: Longman, 1973), discusses many issues relating to voice but never uses the word outside quotation marks. These works illustrate most of the important uses (and misuses) of “voice” as a critical term, apart from occasional or purely figurative uses. All these uses (with the exception of Rosolato's) are touched upon in my essay.

⁵ The term “positive lever” is Jacques Derrida's. See Translator's Preface to Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), p. lxxv.

⁶ All references are to As I Lay Dying (1930; rpt. New York: Vintage-Knopf, 1964).

⁷ Genette, “Boundaries of Narrative,” trans. Ann Levonas, New Literary History, 8 (Autumn 1976), 1–13. This is a translation of Genette's essay “Frontières du récit,” Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969).

⁸ The manner in which critics praise dialogue is indicative: “consistently echoes the accepted speech of the day,” “there is no line of dialogue from a novel that could not easily be imagined proceeding from the mouth of an actual person,” and “the dialogues … could not reproduce actual speech more faithfully, and more unselectively, if they had been transcribed from a tape-recorder.” These are quoted by Page, p. 3.

⁹ See David Hayman and Eric Rabkin's discussion of the “untrustworthy narrator” in Form in Fiction: An Introduction to the Analysis of Narrative Prose (New York: St. Martin's, 1974), pp. 73–77.

¹⁰ See Joseph Robertson, An Essay on Punctuation (1785; facsimile rpt. ed. R. C. Alston, Menston, Eng.: Scolar, 1969), pp. 100, 147.

¹¹ Such a brief example does not do justice to the flexibility of the novel's vernacular. Even within a single narrative section the same character's speech may vary slightly. “Hit” for “it” and the dropping of “g” from “ing” are the most noticeable variations. The manuscript of As I Lay Dying (housed at Alderman Library, Univ. of Virginia) shows that Faulkner deleted “hit” from many passages of dialogue and added it in others.

¹² See R. W. Franklin, “Narrative Management in As I Lay Dying,” Modern Fiction Studies, 13 (Spring 1967), 57–65, and Peter Swiggart, The Art of Faulkner's Novels (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1962), pp. 61, 70.

¹³ A vital distinction between point of view and voice in narrative is developed by Genette in Figures III.

¹⁴ Derrida on Saussure: “The affirmation of the essential and ‘natural’ bond between the phone and the sense, the privilege accorded to an order of signifier (which then becomes the major signified of all other signifiers) depends expressly, and in contradiction to the other levels of the Saussurian discourse, upon a psychology of consciousness and of intuitive consciousness” (p. 40).

¹⁵ André Bleikasten, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, trans. Roger Little (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 63–64.

¹⁶ This is especially true for narrators outside the Bundren family or neighborhood. Their more public narratives are in the past tense (the Bundrens' and Tull's vary in tense) and never violate verisimilitude of voice and person. An obvious example of how the narratives are rendered “public” comes when Samson tries to recall someone's name: “ ‘Who's that?’ MacCallum says: I can't think of his name: Rafe's twin; that one it was… . ‘You better holler at them,’ MacCallum says. Durn it, the name is right on the tip of my tongue” (pp. 106, 107).

¹⁷ Wayne Booth makes a similar point about the freedom allowed in portraying consciousness, though he is speaking of “sympathy” rather than “plausibility”: “Generally speaking, the deeper our plunge [into a character's mind], the more unreliability we will accept without loss of sympathy” (The Rhetoric of Fiction [Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 164).

¹⁸ Bleikasten, p. 64, and Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, p. 161.

¹⁹ Karl Beckson and Arthur Ganz, Literary Terms: A Dictionary (rev. ed. of A Reader's Guide to Literary Terms, 1960; New York: Noonday, 1975), p. 181. The original version did not contain “voice.” In the title of a recent article Daniel R. Schwarz uses “voice” (apparently meaning “author's voice”) in a manner implying that all readers will understand the term in the same way: “Speaking of Paul Morel: Voice, Unity, and Meaning,” Studies in the Novel, 8 (Fall 1976), 255–77.

²⁰ Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Partisan Review, 42 (1975), 610. See also The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1972), pp. 92–95.

²¹ I paraphrase Calvin Bedient, who says that one reason the novel seems so mysterious and “contains no explanations” is that there is no “organizer behind the spectacle” of events. “There is thus in the novel a fundamental silence that is truly terrible” (“Pride and Nakedness: As I Lay Dying,” Modern Language Quarterly, 29 [March 1968], 62).

²² The term “context” is also used to denominate one aspect of verbal signification: a word's signification can be determined by the words with which it appears. This kind of verbal context is not part of the paralinguistic context I am referring to.

²³ Punctuation is sometimes on the border line between textual and mimetic voice. We can signal a “question” orally with a rising pitch at the end of a sentence; we can indicate it verbally through word order; we can mark it in a text with “?” The oral and textual markings both can function without the verbal; each is part of its respective kind of voice. To the extent that quotation marks indicate the “re-presentation” of spoken words, they are part of mimetic voice; to the extent that they bracket a word or phrase to give it special status, to call attention to it, they belong to textual voice.

²⁴ Author's Note to Lost in the Funhouse, p. ix.

²⁵ Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random, 1977), p. 44.

²⁶ John Hollander has written about poetry (and not merely “experimental” poetry) as for the ear and for the eye: Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).

²⁷ Experiments with punctuation, etc., are more frequent and more complicated in The Sound and the Fury (esp. in the Quentin section) than in As 1 Lay Dying.

²⁸ We might also include the unusual variations in tense (in the narrative discourse), most of which do not affect the time of narration. These are, however, verbal changes with no special visual status, so I hesitate to include them as part of textual voice. See my discussion of the tense changes in “Shapes of Time and Consciousness in As I Lay Dying,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 16 (1975), 723–37.

²⁹ Virginia Woolf uses precisely this technique of introducing interior monologue with, conventional speaker identification: “The purple light,’ said Rhoda, ‘in Miss Lambert's ring …”’ (The Waves [New York: Harcourt, 1931], p. 34). The effect is to make the monologues much closer in status to imitated speech.

³⁰ I am grateful for the assistance I received, in completing this essay, from a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.