This creation of an imaginary space of narration is a complex stylization, a kind of rhetorical zone in which the narrator “recounts” events-actions, emotions, thoughts-as though he or she has “observed” them, though no such space of witness exists within or outside the story told. That we accept this rhetoric of recounting and observing, this imaginary space from which someone who is no one addresses us, is at the very least a significant achievement in our modern capacity for alienation.
Two originators of novel theory, the early Lukhcs and Bakhtin, do not presup- pose an imaginary space of narration. They look at narration from the standpoint of writing. Rather than treating the novel as a type of narrative among others (myth, folktale, film, and so on) as narrative theory and narratology do, the novel theorists consider the novel a specific, though diverse and polyglot, cultural form and social practice.
The essential reference point of novel theory for Bakhtin is the process of composition; he conceives of the novel as discourse, an act of communication ventured in, and venturing to alter, concrete public spheres. The composition or construction of a novel takes as its raw material a variety of discourses active in society at large and re-voices them. In the terms he developed in the essay “The Problem of Speech Genres,” these pre-existing social discourses are “primary genresw-for example, “the rejoinder in dialogue, everyday stories, letters, dia- ries, minutes, and so forth”-which “secondary, complex genres,” like novels, “play out” (Speech 98). The novel engages the sociality of communication on, as it were, two fronts: on the one hand, it incorporates into its very construction discourses originating in several social contexts, public and private; and, on the other hand, it addresses itself to, intervenes in, an actual public realm.
Poe’s achievement is immense, and if my hypothesis is correct that it established the conventions of the imaginary space of narration and the structured distinc- tion of narrator and (implied) author, it has had a profound effect on reading habits and criticism.
Bakhtin thus sees in the flexibility and relativity of “double-voiced” narrations the writer’s leeway to experiment with his or her commitment to the norms and meanings of a particular discourse. Keying on the resources that such “a refract- ing of authorial intentions” affords the comic novel in particular, he stresses the “variety of different distances between distinct aspects of the narrator’s language and the author’s language” (315).Poe’s innovative stylization turns the relativity of double voice to a more regulated, unified purpose. He renders it “monologi- cal” in Bakhtin’s terms or “parsimoniously plural” to borrow Roland Barthes’s term in S/Z.
Bakhtin is truer to the history of the novel in seeing it as a continual appropriation of other social discourses, including the whole array of storytelling modes.
What makes the novel, however, is its voice. Among Flaubert’s indelible con- tributions to the novel form is free indirect style, with its unlimited flexibility in evoking the subjectivity, the interiority and inner speech, of a character within the objectifying trajectory of third-person narration.
“Writing” is on the face of it a literal rather than metaphorical term. And indeed I hold the view, which I associate with the work of Bakhtin and Raymond Williams, that “literature,” broadly defined, is the social practice of writing and therefore inseparable from the social history of literacy. Nevertheless, poststruc- turalism threw a wrench into every purely empirical sense of “writing,” begin- ning with Jacques Derrida’s huge claim in Of Grammatology that Western philosophy conceptualizes speech and writing as opposites and then freights the concept of writing with whatever features of language are deemed errant and recalcitrant to the reigning metaphysical idea of the nature of language. De Man’s Allegories of Reading and Derrida’s own work as a literary critic, especially in the essays on Plato, MallarmC, and Philippe Sollers in La disstmination, revolu- tionized literary studies by showing that mefaphors of writing are so integral to every practice of writing that it is impossible to say what writing is-as artistic activity, social practice, or vocation-without entering the metaphorical or figurative labyrinth of the written text.
“Voice” is overtly metaphorical and has acquired connotations ranging from onto-theological presence to the lingusitic technicalities of grammatical mood. Yet, it has distinctive advantages over other widely used terms in novel criticism. Unlike “presiding consciousness,” it does not presuppose what shape the subjec- tivity of writing and reading actually takes, or ought to take, in novels. Unlike “point of view” or “perspective,” it does not import a visual metaphor into the account of a phenomenon of language.
Moreover, because novel theory starts from the worldly intersubjectivity of writing and reading, it eliminates the need for dubious categories like “vision” or “focalization” to fit intersubjectivity into novelistic prose, whether the shadowy intersubjectivity of free-indirect third-person narration or the relatively delimited intersubjectivity of unreliable first-person narrations. For Bakhtin, language is in essence intersubjective, lying “on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he approriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention” (293). The novelist’s stylistic achievement of “double voicing,” however master- ful, derives from the existential condition of every speaking being: no one ever truly originates or masters speech.
