His Talesman’s Voice

How to keep the Narrator’s Voice in the Reader’s Ear

Yesterday, in ‘Bad Head Hops,’ I wrote about David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus as an example of ‘head hopping’ — the practice of telling us readers what different characters in a single scene are thinking and feeling, without the voice of the narrator to intermediate — and I agreed that under these conditions, I found the effect jarring and unpleasant. The only way to ‘head hop’ and not jar the audience is to give us something to rely on as we peer from head to head. If we hear the voice of the narrator, then we can accept that he tells us what one character thinks, and then another character, in the same scene. And of course, this is the way all tales were told in the beginning, and for a hundred thousand years afterward.

This does come at a price — so long as we hear the narrator’s voice, we are aware of him, standing as intermediary between us and the characters. We experience the tale as a tale, and not as a dream in which we participate directly as one of the characters. The vividness pales, and we lose the sense of being swallowed up in the world, the characters, the events. We cannot lose ourselves in the tale. But it is this very loss of self that seems to appeal so strongly to readers today, which is why this first- or third-person subjective voice dominates in fiction, and has done so for decades.

But let’s say a talesman wished to tell his tale ‘the old-fashioned way’ — how to go about it?

I think his task is made harder by the current trends. Readers today are so accustomed to the subjective voice, and the transparent narrator, that we find it hard to remember that the tale does have a narrator at all, even though his name is on the cover, and his picture may be there too — even though he may be famous and we see him being interviewed and read news stories about him!

It’s even hard to tell a tale in this way. At least it is for me: time and again I find myself losing myself in my own tales, forgetting I am telling them, and slipping back into the subjectivity of dreams. The writing becomes semi-automatic, it flows with the current of the events as I imagine them taking place before me and all around me. Time and again I must remind myself that I am telling this, and drag myself back to narrating.

These bits of advice, then, you must take as only partial answers to the riddle. If you want to tell tales the traditional way, as the talesman, then try these techniques, but it may yet happen to you as it does to me, and you will find you need to watch yourself as you write, bring yourself back out of the swamp of subjectivity and dream, and train yourself to this more traditional (and more natural?) way.

First, the opening. Here the Narrator must be established strongly. The start of any tale is formless and void; the audience has the least expectations here, of what the tale will be, how it will proceed, and what his role will be. The very first sentence must establish the Narrator as ‘I’ or ‘We’ or even by name. Or else it must establish the Narrator by implication by naming the audience as ‘You.’ Both effects are possible by using ‘We’ to include both Narrator and Audience:

We have heard many tales, you and I, of King Arthur and his knights of the Table Round. But this tale is a bit unusual, even for that fairy realm.

In the example above, another way to establish the Narrator by implication, is shown: that is to openly admit that what is begun is a Tale; this strongly implies the Talesman.

But even with the Narrator established at the start, talesman and audience, accustomed to the modern fashion of the un-narrated narrative, may well forget. Thus it helps to offer reminders along the way. These reminders bring the voice of the Narrator back into focus for a paragraph or more, and force the audience to remember their relationship to the events, that this is a tale they are being told.

Where to put such reminders, so that they don’t interrupt the flow of events more than need be?

Any place where there is a natural break in the tale is a good place for the Narrator to speak once more in his own voice. This happens, for example, where a series of events must be summed up between scenes, where a passage of time takes place, or a passage from one setting to a distant one. It also happens when the narrative leaves following one character and takes up events dominated by another character.

Structural breaks are also good places to use for these reminders. Section breaks, chapter breaks, part breaks — all offer the narrative a further, if diminished, chance to ‘start over again,’ and so the same strategy the Talesman used at the tale’s start can be used again here.

It is also good if the talesman who would try this traditional way of telling his tale, should immerse himself in the reading of tales told using this approach. Read them, and speak them aloud, and try to imagine that you have an audience about you. Record your readings, and play them back, and hear them as the audience.

Finally, the best way to do this is for the talesman to bear in mind, all the while, that he is telling the tale. When he sits down to start his composition again, and when he leaves off; when he re-reads what he has written, and re-drafts.

These ploys should in the end no longer be needed and the practice should become ‘second nature’ to the talesman, like a second language, so that he should find he can take up a tale as un-narrated, or as narrated, just as he pleases.

(Composed on keyboard Saturday, June 21, 2008)