First Voice

I suppose I begin with the thing that started my thinking about voice and it’s that quote by Philip Roth I’ve put to the right of the page. When I first read this line I questioned if ‘voice’ is really as uncategorisable as this quote would suggest. Might we not equally equate it to ‘genius’ and from there leave it alone as an irreducible truth? The assumption is that ‘voice’ is out there, to be picked up from ether if the writer has the talent. It’s a fairly common assumption. It’s the hackneyed line: ‘You either have it or you don’t, kid... And you sure as hell don’t’.

My instincts – my faith, I suppose – encourage me to believe that it’s more practical than that. Voice is a deliberate construction which at the most basic level comes down to lexical choices, runs through syntax and grammar, and expands to include something as nebulous as ‘world view’ or ideology. Might we not say that Orwell’s voice is still apparent in many an iconic dystopia?

At the level of words, though, I think we can be more precise. Roth himself writes the words of Nathan Zuckerman who is himself repeating the words of his idol, E. I. Lonoff. And he makes an subtle choice in the quote that really began my thinking about voice. ‘Voice’, says Lonoff, ‘begins at around the back of the knees’. I think the ‘at’ is superfluous unless it does something we don’t initially notice. Voice ‘begins around’ would make for an easier read. Only, voice is not about what’s easy. It’s about what is characteristic. The ‘at’ gives us a broken rhythm of speech, or, at the least, it locates us in the idiom of the Jewish writer living much of his life out in the countryside. Lonoff, Zuckerman, or Roth: the line passes us by unpolished. And to my untrained ear (or eye) is critical to understand voice because voice is as much about the unpolished nature of prose than it is about presenting clean marble. Voice is alive when prose appears to be hewn from a natural rock face.

To jump metaphors: it is the background radiation – a ‘white noise’ – that lies beneath whatever we’re hearing.

Take another example, and speaking of 'White Noise', it is from the first page of Don DeLillo’s ‘Falling Man’.

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads. They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them, confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people taking shelter under cars.

Where is the voice here? I would say it’s the prolonged detail lapsing into repetition (the running and repeated images of people covering their faces). I also think it’s most apparent in the disjointed fourth sentence, beginning ‘They had shoes...’. The narrator breaks off, ‘a woman with a shoe in each hand’, as if the woman has literally run through his sentence. The voice here is harried. It makes, of course, for a great opening. There is momentum generated by fleeting glimpses of a scene, rather than a prolonged exposure to detail.