Who Speaks?

When a talesman tells us a tale, who’s talking?

The Fourth Voice

I’ve been reading This Year You Write Your Novel, a pretty good essay on writing by Walter Mosley published by Little, Brown & Co in a frightfully-overpriced edition. Mr Mosley says something that intrigued me when he discussed narrative voice. By ‘narrative voice’ Mr Mosley means how the talesman positions his audience relative to the characters in the tale. Mr Mosley lists three kinds of narrative voice. First he writes about where the talesman pretends to be one of the characters (as in ‘I went to the store, and saw my old teacher, the one I always hated’). Here the talesman invites us to see the tale through one character’s eyes.

Second, Mr Mosley writes about third-person narrative, where the talesman pretends to know all about one of the characters (one in a scene) but not the others (in that scene), but using the third-person tense only (as in, ‘He went to the store, and saw his old teacher, the one he always hated’). Here the talesman invites us to sit on one character’s shoulder as we go through each scene.

The third kind of narrative Mr Mosley writes about is told by an omniscient narrator, where the talesman drops all pretense and admits to us openly he knows everything that happens and what every character in his tale thinks and feels. By this the talesman invites us to leap from eye to eye, heart to heart throughout all the characters just as he pleases.

But there is a fourth voice Mr Mosley mentions, only to discard it. This last voice, he writes, is one that the talesman should never use — it is his own voice.

Why not?

The Great Taboo

Mr Mosley does not explain why he considers this ‘fourth voice’ to be taboo. He says no more than this. But if we look closer at the rest of his discussion of narrative voice, we find the taboo only more riddling.

For example, Mr Mosley calls the first-person narrative the ‘most familiar’ of the four, the one people ‘naturally’ use when they tell what happened to them that day in their own lives. But when people tell their stories, don’t they use their own voices?

Going on the third-person narrative, Mr Mosley says he prefers it over first-person, because it puts a distance between the audience and the characters. Though we know what a character feels and thinks, we learn it at a remove, through an ‘even-tempered voice,’ which Mr Mosley says is good. But Mr Mosley does not tell us whose voice this is, if it is neither the character’s nor the talesman’s own.

And when he talks about the omniscient narrator, Mr Mosley calls it the ‘voice of God’ — but why can it not be the ‘voice of the talesman’?

Mr Mosley’s essay (as much as I’ve read of it) is a good one. Simple, clear, direct, and practical. I don’t want to pick on Mr Mosley here, because I think his attitude is the one most writers and writing teachers hold today. Omniscient narrators were well and good in their day (the 19th century) but are out of fashion now; first-person is good, but third-person is best. ‘Show don’t tell’ is another bit of common advice Mosley shares with everybody else who teaches writing, and this creed joins very well with the advice that we should never use our own voice. ‘Show don’t tell’ is a conscious effort on the talesman’s part to obliterate his own role in the talespinning, to reduce himself to the anonymity of the film camera, itself of no color, humor, or personality. But Mr Mosley’s advice struck me because he alone goes so far as even to consider the talesman’s own voice. The other writing teachers I’ve read fail even to mention it, as if the taboo had put it beyond the pale of thought.

A Crime

I submit that the obliteration of the narrator, and this choking of the talesman’s voice (for the two go hand-in-hand) is a great crime in talesmanship. For it cripples the talesman by not allowing him to use his own passion, his own opinions, in the telling of his tale.

I also submit that we will find more often than not that the great talesmen of the 19th century who used omniscient narration identified with those narrators themselves, and felt free to offer their own opinions on what went on in their tales.

Today this is only offered to us as a mask, a secondary tale placed on top of the main one. Where we find a narrative voice that tells us what it thinks and feels and likes and doesn’t like, we find that this is not the writer’s own self, but a pose, a mask, a conceit he adopts through which he colors the tale with an imagined talesman he places in between himself and his tale.

A Question

I don’t mean that the talesman ought to give us his views on every aspect of the tale at its every turn. This would distract us from the events themselves, remind us that ‘it’s only a story,’ and make us look too much at the talesman in himself. The puppeteer wants us to watch the puppets, not himself.

But all the same, the talesman is a man of flesh and blood, he has his thoughts, he feels things like other men, and why should he choke all this down when he picks up the speaker’s staff?

And it still remains for Mr Mosley and the others of the writing schools of today to answer the question, If it isn’t the talesman’s voice who tells the third-person narrative, whose voice is it?

(Composed with pen on paper Friday 01 February 2008)