The Master’s Voice

On the tale that has no actors

In ‘One, Two, Many, None’ we looked at what changed in talesmanship when different voices are added to the tale. The basis of this was the development of Greek drama, which began with only a chorus singing a song about some legendary/historical event, then added a single Actor to the chorus, then a second Actor, and a third. Each of these innovations changed the very nature of the way we in the audience experienced the tales. And, as each voice was added, the original voice of the Chorus dwindled.

In the text tale, or the spoken narrative, we can say that the Narrator (the talesman himself, usually) is the equivalent of the drama’s Chorus. So we can see how, as tales (short stories, novels, novellas, radio plays, movies and television as well as plays) developed the voices of the characters, the voice of the Narrator dwindled, until today it is considered the proper way of telling a tale to suppress the Narrator altogether — or at least as far as the author can manage.

So, let’s take a step back, to the beginning (or near to the beginning). What is a tale like, that has no voices for its characters, only the voice of the narrator? How is such a tale different in its effect on us in the audience, how is it different in kind, from the tales we are used to?

Well, we do still tell some tales in this fashion. Children’s tales and fairy tales often have no voices for their characters.

(To be clear here: when I say a character has ‘no voice’ I mean that there is no dialogue directly attributed to him. Nothing that would show up, for example, in quotation marks — nothing that we wouldn’t ‘hear’ as though it came from his lips.)

The first thing that stands out is that, even as the Narrator’s voice dwindles when the characters gain their voices, so that the Narrator tells us only functional, mechanical things, so in a tale where there is only the Narrator’s voice, he stands out, perforce, as a personality. He cannot hide behind events. He is openly acknowledged.

He is telling us something, and he has his reasons.

He may indeed have some relationship to the events he speaks about.

He may celebrate the events he tells, or mourn them.

And he will have some personal relationship to the characters — that is, he will praise and laud some and scorn others. He has a stake in the whole thing, an agenda. This may be true of all talesmen, but here, because the Narrator stands out so stark, we in the audience must wonder and question what his agenda might be.

It is an old tradition, that the Poet sing his tales in High Style, one befitting his noble subject, and a style he would not use in common parlance. Other talesmen have matched their styles to whatever the matter was in the tale at hand, and some talesmen use the same style in all their tales.

And yet a man’s Voice is more than his style. Style is but one part of the voice of the narrator. The rest holds all his personality, values, goals, and humor.

But it all pales when the characters in the tales begin to speak, and drown their narrators out.

(Composed on keyboard Thursday, July 10, 2008)