Tone: Writing and the Sound of Feeling 9781501362569, 9781501362576, 9781501362606, 9781501362590

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Tone

ii

Tone Writing and the Sound of Feeling

Judith Roof

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2020 Copyright © Judith Roof, 2020 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Daniel Benneworth-Gray All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Roof, Judith, 1951- author. Title: Tone: writing and the sound of feeling / Judith Roof. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Explores a crucial but elusive aspect of writing, tone, across fiction, creative non-fiction, and electronicallygenerated prose”–Provided by pub-lisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2020003347 | ISBN 9781501362569 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501362576 (paperback) | ISBN 9781501362590 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501362583 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mood (Psychology) in literature. | Literature, Modern–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC PN56.M57 R66 2020 | DDC 801/.92–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020003347 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6256-9    PB: 978-1-5013-6257-6    ePDF: 978-1-5013-6259-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-6258-3 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Katherine Burkman

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CONTENTS

Preface: Key Tone  ix Acknowledgments  xii

1 Setting the Tone  1 2 Toning Up  13 3 Tone Jam  21 4 Intoning  31 5 Taking That Tone  41 6 Two Tone  53 7 Two Tones  63   8 Atonement: The Sound a Tree Makes When It Falls  79 9 Tone Down  89 10 Touch Tone  97 11 Tense Tone  105 12 Tone “R” Us  113 13 We-tone  127 14 The Tone “We” Tell  137 15 Tonal Dialogics  143

viii CONTENTS

16 Inscribing Tone  151 17 Moebius Tone  161 18 Telling Tones  171 19 iTone  179 20 Toning Fork  189 21 Dissonant Tones  197 22 Toning Up/Toning Down  203 23 Tone-ads  211 24 Robo-tone  227 Notes  235 Bibliography 263 Index 270

PREFACE: KEY TONE

Tone Def: Etymology mid-14c., “musical sound or note,” from Old French ton “musical sound, speech, words” (13c.) and directly from Latin tonus “a sound, tone, accent,” literally “stretching” (in Medieval Latin, a term peculiar to music), from Greek tonos “vocal pitch, raising of voice, accent, key in music,” originally “a stretching, tightening, taut string,” related to teinein “to stretch,” from PIE root *ten- “to stretch.” Sense of “manner of speaking” is from c. 1600. First reference to firmness of body is from 1660s. As “prevailing state of manners” from 1735; as “style in speaking or writing which reveals attitude” from 1765. Tone-deaf is from 1880; tonepoem from 1845.1 What will interest us today—what we must respond to, for interest now becomes an inappropriate word—is an accent in the novelist’s voice, an accent for which the flutes and saxophones of fantasy may have prepared us. His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to “say” anything about the universe; he proposes to sing, and the strangeness of a song arising in the halls of fiction is bound to give us a shock. How will a song combine with the furniture of our common sense? We shall ask ourselves, and shall have to answer “not too well”: the singer does not always have room for his gestures, the tables and chairs get broken, and the novel through which bardic influence has passed often has a wrecked air, like a drawing room after an earthquake or a children’s party. Readers of D. H. Lawrence will understand what I mean.2

x PREFACE: KEY TONE

What Tone and Why? Tone is the quality you imagine you hear (audiate) when you read. Tone both produces and seems to emanate from an imaginary voice (or voices) recounting a printed text. The text’s diction, syntax, contexts, and connotations merge to produce tone as a complex, imaginary audial phenomenon. A text’s enactment of its telling produces the impression that there is a teller, whose tone, whether identifiably personable, simply hosting, roving, or barely perceptible, derives from the story’s specific rhetorical impressions. This tone, in turn, produces a more specific sense of a still imaginary narrator from whom this tone seems to emanate. Tone is thus a moebius, producing the imaginary of the one who would produce such a tone, as well as the teller’s various attitudes, feelings, perspectives, inclinations, and moods. In all texts, the tone of the telling produces the sense of a narrator who tells. Theories of narrative and narrating as well as interpretations of individual texts rarely treat tone as a necessary or important element of literary critique. There is seldom any discussion of tone as an essential element of narration, inhabiting a sense of narrated events, contributing to the production of character, diegesis, story, or as being anything other than an indicator of the imaginary narrator’s (often conflated with the “author”) attitude toward some element it recounts. Readers tend to be conscious of tone when it accompanies and defines more rhetorical arguments, where tone (ironic, exhortative, chiding, enthusiastic, etc.) is an overt device for persuasion. Tone is, nonetheless, a key element by which all texts produce the illusion of a telling voice, offer a sense of personality, inflect events recounted, anticipate certain directions, and create an ambiance that simultaneously produces, enables, and shapes narratives and characters, while producing a feel that may or may not seduce or alienate readers. Tone is central, persuasive, pervasive, and dangerous.3 Because readers audiate tone (and, according to groups of readers, not all readers audiate when they read or are aware that they do so), tone seems to derive from a subjective impression, attributed to an originary or “outside” agency/narrator/author whose attitudes tone conveys. Since tone is an effect of the text, we can track the elements that produce whatever variations in audiation there might be by

PREFACE: KEY TONE 

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closely reading a text’s diction, syntax, elements of context (reader’s assumptions about author, style, genre, period, etc.) and the ways the accruing ordering of plot events and characterological details retrospectively resignify tone as we read along.4 The complexities of tone suggest that reading is always simultaneously forward and backward, anticipatory and retrospective. Tone is an ever-changing impression that builds on itself and the context which produces it. What is the tone of this introduction? Earnest? Chiding? Nostalgic? But, more important, how do these tones relate to what the text offers? How does any text produce tone in the first place? Only by investigating tone’s production can we understand tone and how it operates within texts to produce attitude, feeling, personality, inclination, and atmosphere. What follows are twentyfour short essays on how texts produce tone and how tones work in texts. This is a broad study of tone in (primarily) twentieth-century and contemporary English-language literary and critical texts that range from modernist fiction to robot-authored news stories. It is also a return to some of the ignored but recently crucial products of close reading. The purpose of these essays is to show not only how complexly tone is both engrained in and produced by texts but also the ways tone is an intrinsic part of both art and “meaning.” Language always bears tone, even if it seems to thud soundlessly onto a rock wall. Tone derives from the lovely reverberations, echoes, resoundings, joy, angst, raised-eyebrow, snide, tongue-incheek utter seriousness of language that produces the telling, colors what the teller offers, and embraces the audiating reader as a part of the process.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

When some recent scholarship suggested that “close” reading was not only unnecessary but even perhaps problematic, I paid attention, perhaps ironically, to the often-scolding tone of such claims. I wondered what in these texts produced this sense, and I realized that it came from the language itself and that I could discern its production through the practices of close reading. I have always been fond of the explication du texte methods I learned as a student of French literature and culture at The Ohio State University. For this, I thank Ann Dubé and the late Charles G. S. Williams. I also owe thanks to Christian Johnson, whose undergraduate honor’s thesis analyzing sound imagery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway introduced me to the concept of “audiation,” which soon seemed exactly the mechanism that delivered the sense of “tone” in written texts. Sydney Boyd and Laura K. Richardson generously read drafts of the manuscript and offered instructive commentary, and I thank them along with the press’s manuscript reviewers, who offered valuable advice. I am also grateful to Anne-Laure Tissut, Ann C. Hall, Alan Nadel, Michael Miller, Melissa Bailar, Brooke Clark, Tim Morton, and Clint Wilson for their insights, and to Molly Slattery, who helped prepare the final manuscript. In many ways, this has been the best book-writing experience I have ever enjoyed. I would also like to thank the Bloomsbury Publishing production staff, including literary editor Haaris Naqvi and assistant Amy Martin.

1 Setting the Tone

While still a young man, John Courtney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, “achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.” His novels sold fifteen thousand copies in their first year and were read by people whose opinion John Boot respected. Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price.1 These are the opening lines of the novel, Scoop (1937), by Evelyn Waugh.2 Many readers come to this novel with some preconceptions, depending on the circumstances of their reading. If they are familiar with other works by Waugh, they may have expectations about style, tone, and genre. If the novel were, say, an assignment for a class, they would most likely approach it from the vantages established by the topic and methods of the course. Perhaps readers commence the novel only with presumptions about the style prevalent during the literary period in which the novel was written and published. Certainly, they would have preconceptions based on the text’s place of origin and the nationality, the sex, social class, and so forth of its author (insofar as they might be familiar with these facts). As readers commence their reading, the novel itself will offer cues to its consumption. Novels tell us how to read them. The novel’s genre, plot, setting, characters, narrative structure, style, mood, voice, and tone all help produce a figment of environment, the novel’s

2 TONE

diegesis. Most readers are very good at discerning some of these features, as they constitute the routine of most English literature classes. Thus, such narrative elements as plot, character, and setting seem reassuringly apparent. But more difficult to apprehend and certainly to discuss is the personality—the feel—of the narration: the style, mood, voice, and tone of its telling. This more impressionistic quality is the sum effect of the ways the text’s constitutive linguistic elements—diction, grammar, the complexity of sentence structure— combine with cultural associations and connotations to produce more subtle feelings, impressions, and implications that constitute something like a text’s “aura.”3 This aura not only emanates the text’s vigor and personality but also comprises one aspect of its “meaning,” which the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness depicts as a quality that “was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”4 All of these stylistic effluences—mood, voice, and tone—derive from and enlist one another. They are the sum effects of the more expansive category of style, which emerges as an effect of the idiosyncratic way texts deploy language. We generally link “mood” to the apprehension of a text’s “atmosphere.” Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories, for example, might induce a “mood” of discomfort and apprehension as the combined effect of plot, character, setting, voice, and tone. Voice and tone, however, contribute to and derive from the ambiance of a novel’s diegesis, even as readers audiate both as effects of a text’s style. To audiate is to imagine hearing the sound—the quite literal “tone” of a “voice”—that appears to speak as an effect of the telling. This tone of voice is not the author (though often confused and/or conflated with an imaginary of the author) but an imaginary attribute of the text’s narrator, which is itself produced by the text as an effect of its telling.5 One curious tendency is almost certain: although Scoop is a product of British culture, American readers will audiate the telling in various American accents. And, although Americans may miss some cultural jokes and ironies, they almost always audiate the text’s various tones anyway.6 Tone, finally, is produced by the text and not by the specter of an originary author. Among the more impressionistically gleaned aspects of narrative, tone is central to how we consume, feel, appreciate,



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define, and recall narratives. What is so difficult about defining tone? Rhetoricians, such as Wayne C. Booth, have offered much insight into the operations of “voice” (author, narrator, or both as these two figments persist in their conflation).7 But very few have, except most tersely, incidentally, or even dismissively, undertaken an exploration of how texts produce the phenomenon of tone. In concert with narrative’s co-constitutive qualities such as voice, tone enacts the illusion of a narratorial persona—the text produces the narrator—as the telling combines all of the elements of a recounting persona synergistically. How does narration produce tone, and how does tone, in turn, conduce the ambiance, attitude—the feel—of narration? How does tone engage synergistically with other textual elements? In what ways does tone extend texts beyond themselves, sustaining the audiation that merges text and reader? So, to begin again, Scoop’s commencement: While still a young man, John Courtney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, “achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.” His novels sold fifteen thousand copies in their first year and were read by people whose opinion John Boot respected. Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price.8 How we read this novel will depend on many things, among which is our audiation of its tone, the combination of imagined attitude, feeling, distance, engagement, and investment as well as estimations of the text’s desired addressee. Tone offers clues to how to read the text and accept the narration’s depictions and judgments. It will signal how serious a text is and what its stance is about the characters and events it depicts. It instigates the reader’s identification with the narrator’s voice and attitude—its position vis-à-vis what it appears to narrate. Readers can reject tones (and entire books) based on audiations of tone as snide, narcissistic, nasty, supercilious, chiding, etc. How do we discern the tone of a novel’s narration? If tone is a matter of audiation or estimating audiation, what parts of the text offer its aural cues? If we do audiate tone as an imaginary voice that emerges as if already produced, how do we know how it sounds?

4 TONE

And what difference to the success of the text, the felicity of our reading experience, or the text’s artfulness does our perception of tone make? Here is why it is difficult to find discussions about or definitions of literary tone: “While still a young man, John Courtney Boot had, as his publisher proclaimed, ‘achieved an assured and enviable position in contemporary letters.’”9 Let us begin with an easy hypothesis, easy in the sense that the evidence is right on the page. Tone is the combined product of apprehensions of diction and syntax as these interact with one another. The first sentence in the quotation above, presumably delivered in the present of the narration of the story, describes a character’s past accession to a certain reputation in the literary world, the characteristics of which appear in a subordinate clause the text attributes to another speaker it identifies only as “his publisher.” Structurally, the sentence begins with an adverbial clause that only implies but does not state its subject and verb (i.e., he was). The opening adverb is a temporal signifier (“while”) that refers to the life history of the clause’s “young man,” about whom at this point, we know nothing else. The sentence, thus, begins at an ambiguous, middling point in time that could potentially be either the present of youth or the time frame of a past action soon to be defined. The opening adverb clause refers to an as yet unnamed “young man,” but provides the circumstance for the meaningful addition of the appositive—“John Courtney Boot”—that retroactively defines the subject of the opening clause. Just as the narrative begins in medias res, or more accurately in medium vitae, so the names that define the “young man” occur in the middle, this time of the sentence, posited between an adverbial clause and the subordinate clause that completes the sentence. The subordinate clause interposes another speaker between the opening narrator and the object narrated: an unnamed “publisher” who defines the “young man” as having gained a certain respect, at least in the eyes of others. Both the beginning and ending of the first sentence describe a character without the necessity of his appositive name. So far, one narrator frames another and between them is the object of interest. Ironically (if you are familiar with the novel), the role of the character/subject of this first sentence parallels the clauses that frame his appositive name, as he appears only at the beginning and end of the tale. And, as one might guess, he is no more than a middling writer.



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The main verb of this first sentence is “had . . . achieved,” the past perfect tense defining the sentence’s subject character as perhaps no longer the young man he was when he gained the reputation the publisher’s quote provides (or produces or secures or contrives— is the publisher a reliable source in the end?). That the narrator gleans the subject “young man’s” achievement from another source brings this achievement into some small question insofar as the accomplishment of this “young man” supplies his defining characteristic from an unnamed source that is simultaneously a profession (one who ought to know) and biased (it is the young man’s own publisher). The “young man” had “achieved,” a verb that connotes striving, persisting, earning. “An assured and enviable position” is what the publisher declares he had gained, with “assured” suggesting something guaranteed and secure. But the sentence also suggests that this condition of being “assured,” itself an adjective derived from the past participle of a verb that also functions as passive voice, is enhanced by something other than the young man’s own work, perhaps by the quoted speaker himself. “Enviable” refers to the desirability of this author’s “assured” position, but also again might imply that this position is less John Courtney Boot’s accomplishment than the feelings of others, and perhaps also implies the potential presence of jealous and grudging competitors. These competitors would, the passage also implies, be that group of people interested in “contemporary letters,” the other “young” men who might vie with John Courtney Boot for such an “assured” position. Just as this opening sentence implies various possibilities the very notion of tonal implication already enwraps, so the discourse conveys a tone that enwraps the already enwrapped topic of the sentence. And to top it off, the verb “imply” itself derives etymologically from the Latin implicare, which means to entangle. Nowhere does the publisher’s comment describe the young man’s actual work, talent, probity, or any other writerly accomplishment, limiting itself merely to his “position,” an attribute derived from the opinions of others. In addition, this opening sentence also deploys what appears to be the vocabulary that connotes literary culture, a stiffness (“enviable,” “assured”) at least partially undone by the object author’s name, but which imitates and perhaps even parodies the pomposity of an educated dialect. So what tone does this combination of sentence grammar, diction, and vague suggestion of parody produce? Insofar as its language

6 TONE

enacts a narrator who is describing this character, it produces a narrator who is vaguely dissociated from its subject, but who derives a hint of pleasure from its overly earnest deployment of and imitative play on literary discourse. The description progressively distances the opening voice from the sentence’s object of apparent interest. Just as the sentence appears to define the subject, the subject itself, John Courtney Boot, too, becomes the object of others’ impressions, remaining somewhat nebulous. Commencing with the more generic description “young man,” the sentence illuminates the description’s opaqueness only by the addition of an appositive, but then returns to its dissociative tactic by quoting another description supplied by another, perhaps less objective speaker. Beginning in the middle of things, this sense of dissociation and distance generates a species of impersonality or attempted objectivity in the introduction of a character, named in the very middle of things, who is in the middle of a literary career where he exists amidst the dual potential of security and envy. The first sentence, thus, enacts a tone that is itself middling—that is, neutral, matter-of-fact, but a bit off-the-cuff, beginning as it does in the middle of a life introduced in an adverbial clause—but with a vague detachment and potential lampooning that expands through the sentence. The sentence’s enactment of slight detachment and equivocation produces a tone of vague but vaguely amused impersonality: but, at the same time and possibly as an effect of this tone, it also incites suspicion as well as an issue of interpretation that arises from the way the sentence avoids its nominal subject in seeming to introduce it. This ambivalence motivates a retroactive reconsideration of the connotations of the sentence’s diction. In this case, the ambiguity of “assured and enviable” rests on the noun “position,” which the adjectives modify. “Position,” which might have escaped as a simple description of vocation (when in fact it is a description of the “young” man’s reputation within a profession), becomes a question of which position the adjectives describe—a position as a respectable writer, or a position as one whose work is “assured” whether it deserves such security or not. This ambiguity produces a potentially different reading of “enviable” as the position of one who may or may not deserve such a secure career as a writer, but who, in having gained such a position, is enviable because of his security and not his talent. The retrospective reconsideration instantiated by the slight shift from the naming of the author to the publisher’s description



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of the position the author had achieved, then, too, retrospectively refines the sense of the narrator whose tone is even a bit more distanced, dubious, and possibly caricatured than when it began the sentence. The narrator’s shift in distance in relation to its subject is simultaneously the effect of and perhaps the motive for including a quote from someone else not about the character but about his authorial reputation as the first description of the character. And in yet another retrospective reconsideration, this sense of the narrator’s tone both derives from and accounts for the choice to nest evasive description in a publisher’s quote—a mechanism that removes any estimation of John Courtney Boot’s talent from the direct aegis of the narrator, who in quoting another with a vested interest in the success of Boot’s career—can simultaneously offer an apparently neutral and middling introduction while at the same time casting a slightly humorous doubt not only about Boot but also about the publishing industry. This analysis illustrates some of the ways that reading the sentence structure (plus a dash of diction) closely shows how elements of narration cooperate to produce tone. But I am not done yet. Right in the middle of all of this is the name—and what is, after all, in a name?—“John Courtney Boot.” A lot, but we need an additional element—the connotations offered by cultural associations. So to revise the definition: tone is the sum effect of diction, syntax, connotation, and cultural associations we might link to specific words, naming practices, and cultural patterns. Taking, then, these three elements into account, what does the introduction of the character’s three names contribute to the text’s enactment of tone? A simple “John Boot” seems quotidian, if a little comic, insofar as monosyllabic names with double o’s are often comic—Boot, Root, Smoot, Roof, Coot. The name “John” could not be more ordinary; “John” is a name that bespeaks the most average of all averages, the most normative of normativities, even evoking relief facilities. But the middle name—“Courtney”—takes the name beyond the unremarkable but vaguely comic into a higher-class realm, where parents give their children surnames for middle names, and where the names themselves connote the “court”—courtliness, courtesy, courtesan—sandwiched between (quite literally in the middle of yet again) the monosyllabic markers of silly mediocrity. The name “Courtney” has two derivations: it refers either to someone from the noble house of “Courtenay” in France or to someone sadly

8 TONE

characterized by a court nez or “short nose.” Hence the name simultaneously connotes the stately and the silly, a history of landed gentry and joking insult. “Courtney” sets off “John Boot” from within, as the name itself occupies a middling grammatical space, by interrupting and settling between the commonplace monosyllabic signifiers of water closets and footwear, importing a soupçon of something else—Class? Education? Distinctiveness? Inadequate facial features? This is not just any “John Boot.” This is John Courtney Boot. And in this novel, the “Courtney” becomes a significant but absent and/or ignored signifier. Just as the character’s name is ensconced between clauses, so the individuating middle moniker arrives sandwiched between two quotidian names, securing finally one vaguely exotic filling to the humdrum nourishment of informative substance, one little flight of fancy in an otherwise mundane description. “Courtney,” a distinguished distinguisher, suggests the character’s exceptionalism, as if he is indeed going to offer something a bit more (or less) than ordinary, a delectable filling of at least intellectual sophistication. (But we will see how the very situating of the name operates in the novel’s play with identities.) What the appositive name does to our estimation of tone, especially if the “Courtney” passes with the same middling detachment of the rest, is to produce both a vaguely distanced matter-of-factness and the slight, nearly imperceptible raise of the eyebrow or conspiratorial wink insofar as the middle name retrospectively makes perfect sense out of the publisher’s quoted characteristics. John Courtney Boot has an “assured and enviable position” because he is John Courtney Boot. No more need be said. But the opening paragraph indeed says more. The passage’s tone resounds its opening duplicities, as if the blandness and unsure narratorial detachment of Boot’s characterization needs a bit more of the “Courtney” element to substantiate its lack of substance. Here, again, is the rest of the brief passage cited above: His novels sold fifteen thousand copies in their first year and were read by people whose opinion John Boot respected. Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price.10



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“His novels sold” begins the next sentence, with the “novels” offered as the sentence’s subject even though they are the traded objects. The use of the passive voice is another mode of detaching, this time producing a distance between Boot and his novels, between Boot and the active appeal of his work, and between the novels and their consumption. These novels “were read by people,” again distancing activity away from Boot, his work, and now even from the readers, as the novels’ consumption, too, is passive. There is no energy in the apprehension of Boot’s work, though the novels do sell fifteen thousand in their first year. And by whom are the novels being read? By “people whose opinion John Boot respected.” Again, by substituting something inanimate and abstract for the human objects (of the preposition) who are presumably Boot’s readerly fans, the sentence removes and distances actor from action, cause from effect and narrator from the subject of narration. These “people” are not “the people” whom John Boot respected, but are instead those “whose opinion” he respected. In continuing to back away from active participation by any human agency, this second sentence elaborates and secures the detachment of the first—a detachment that also enlists a vague suspicion of humor in its listing of financial rewards as part of the rationale for Boot’s “assured and enviable” position along with the readers whose “opinions” Boot respects, a respect deriving in the sentence’s circular logics, partly from the fact that people with respectable opinions are respectable because they read his books. Again, the same ouroboric modifiers, adjectives of reserved praise offered by self-interested speakers in service of their own projects. These sentences circle around themselves while moving further away from the subject character, Boot, only to return to him as the guarantor of his own popularity. The sentence’s announcement of sales numbers continues the mundane, factual approach of the character description. Fifteen thousand is pretty good and that these sales seem to occur with each novel suggests that Boot’s reputation, at least, garners sales and perhaps vice versa. But apart from the provision of facts, undermined as some are by appeals to self-interest, what does the narration offer? The narrated facts establish a character undermined by descriptions of his own self-interest. The mode of telling offers two simultaneous and conflicting views of Boot, rendering him both simple and complex at the same time. In pretending to offer

10 TONE

facts, to be straightforward and matter-of-fact, the novel’s tone makes fun of what it describes by means of innuendo, auxesis, and the undermining subtleties of phrases that in seeming to be straightforward and laudatory instead undo what they seem to praise. The comments about enviability and respectable opinions may well also be a comment on the character of intellectual society itself, which seems to follow fashion as much as (or instead of) quality. The indirectness of the sentence structure also suggests a critique of literary culture (including perhaps the very novel we are reading). This is one way a text inscribes a complex, ambiguous tone that is simultaneously sincere and suggestive, removed and apparently objective, serious and amused, but that uses such a pose as a way to deliver vaguely demeaning comments that themselves sound almost like respectable estimations of talent. What do the tone’s slight dissonances augur for the ensuing narrative in its functional mismatch between an apparent objectivity and its cleverly subtle puncturing remarks? Let us go two sentences further: “Between novels he kept his name sweet in intellectual circles with unprofitable but modish works on history and travel. His signed first editions sometimes changed hands at a shilling or two above their original price.”11 Again, Boot’s “name” appears “between,” in this case ensconced “between novels,” and “modish works on history and travel.” In this part of the description, Boot actively engages in preserving the status of his “name,” his reputation, keeping it “sweet,” with “unprofitable” tomes, the two adjectives clashing slightly insofar as “sweet,” which shifts from more formal to more populist discourse, connotes advantage and profitability. “Sweet” also refers to reputation, modifying “name,” where “sweet’s” association with both literal taste and metaphorical popularity describes the results of remaining visible and popular. The sentence also contrasts novels with Boot’s presumably non-fiction endeavors, whose modishness may derive not only from their subject matter but also from the dictates of fashion—history and travel writing as genres may themselves be modish at this particular historical moment—or even from non-fiction’s contrast with the novels themselves—a contrast which may also contribute to their unprofitability. The second sentence, again in passive voice, describes occasional transactions in which Boot’s “signed first editions” gained a shilling or two in value. Beginning the sentence with the doubled pretension



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of the “signed first edition” produces the expectation that such a treasure might gain substantially more than the auxetic “shilling or two.” The narrator’s matter-of-fact damning with faint praise or praising with faint complements augments its practice in the first two sentences which offer circular and ultimately self-serving accounts of Boot’s reputation. And, emerging in the middle of it all is Boot situated as passive, the manipulative Boot who keeps his name “sweet,” who writes according to fashion instead of conviction, or so we might conclude from the manner in which these first four sentences describe him. The novel, thus, enacts a tone produced as the combined effect of grammar (appositives, passive voice, indirection), diction (“Courtney,” “sweet,” “modish,” “intellectual circles”), and ouroboric contradictions—“assured and enviable position,” publisher’s proclamations. The telling produces the impression of a slightly detached narrator who distances itself by constructing sentences in such a way that their subject—“John Courtney Boot”— seems to define himself, while the narrator merely describes the process and circumstances that have produced that characterization. In appearing to let the subject generate its own contradictions, the telling enacts the sense of a teller who recounts with a tone of casual, slight amusement covered by a pretense of frank reliability created by the sense that the narrator hints but never lets on that anything it is saying is unusual or self-contradictory. In grammatically centering Boot, the beginning of Scoop simultaneously demonstrates both Boot’s conceit and that he does not perhaps deserve the adulation he receives—but—and this is equally important—we really do not know. The tone betrays a soupçon of suspicion, of precisely the distancing that produces a slightly questioning perspective, while also presenting what might seem to be a character whose achievements literally match the terms of their description. With a mere four sentences, Scoop already signals John Courtney Boot’s role in the novel’s events. Passively centered in the opening sentence, the middling Boot ironically appears only at the beginning and end of the novel. Although one of his admirers recommended to a newspaper that it send John Courtney Boot to an Eastern African nation in the throes of political unrest, the editor instead mistakenly sends another Boot, an occasional nature columnist for his paper. The narrative follows the adventures of the naive, yet perspicacious second Boot until the novel’s end, where John Courtney Boot gleans

12 TONE

all of the fame and rewards of the other Boot’s mission. The envy and esteem for John Courtney Boot, it turns out, are, in this case at least, indeed unearned, occurring only as the result of other peoples’ mistaken regard. That close analysis is necessary to track a text’s production of tone makes apparent why there are few critical discussions of tone.12 As an audiated impression, tone’s complexities range through all aspects of a text. Difficult to describe, tone is crucial to the ways we read any text. Missing tone can literalize comical, parodical and/or satirical writing, actually flattening a text to its complete opposite. In ascertaining such contemporary preoccupations as message, justice, and equity, readers who ignore tone misinterpret texts, often finding comic texts indictably insensitive and artlessly chiding texts comforting.

2 Toning Up

For this reason, too, it is better to emphasize that the process of “authorial” selection and arrangement will guarantee that a narrator can never be truly objective or detached from his material. His task is to create the illusion of objectivity and detachment; he appears merely to record events even as he really orders and controls them.1 Writing about Waugh’s early novels in “Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” Robert Frick is concerned with the ways these novels, including Scoop, convey the complex sense of attitude that results in satire.2 For Frick, this attitude is a stylistic production, perhaps emanating from Waugh himself as the author grounding the “authorial,” or maybe coming from the narrator, or from . . . ? Frick’s formulation of the source of this attitude enacts the slippage common in accounts of the imagined source of a text’s voice. While we might usefully ask why critics often displace the issue of tone into discussions about the source of a text’s “attitudes,” “voice,” or as Wayne Booth suggests, the “implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey,” Frick’s symptomatic ambivalence about the relative positions/functions of the “authorial” and the “narrator” enact the problem of tone as already a question of tone in the critic’s pronouncements about tone.3 In the passage above, “the process of ‘authorial’ selection and arrangement,” presumably of the “material” that concludes the first sentence, is somehow removed from the agency of an actor masked by a scare-quoted adjective, “authorial,” modifying “selection and arrangement.” Ironically, perhaps, the “process”

14 TONE

only “will guarantee” the narrator’s ultimate lack of objectivity. To guarantee a negative—“a narrator can never be truly objective or detached from his material”—is a strangely indirect way of implying either that the narrator will remain emotionally attached to “his material,” or that the “authorial” will take responsibility for not completely removing whatever continuous agency critics might imagine is narrating from a perceptible investment in the narrative. The “authorial” has simultaneously taken the position of a function that warrants a more detached performance on the part of a narrator and has transformed itself painlessly from its initial adjectival displacement to the agency subtending a narrator whose actions this first “authorial” determiner assures us will not approach the “truly objective.” Frick’s characterization, which simultaneously evades and offers a vague account of the relations between author and narrator, is masterfully circuitous, indefinite, and ultimately illusive. It is itself a framing enactment of “the illusion of objectivity and detachment” (emphasis added) that the “authorial” “guarantees,” insuring, in its indefinite positioning and assurances of continued attachment, that it will not be too detached as it discusses the author’s/narrator’s lack of detachment. Deploying a discourse of certainty and truth that binds one function to another, (but where the functions themselves also seem to be one and the same), Frick’s description of the relation of the “authorial” to “a narrator” already enacts (while pretending not to) the symptomatic conflation of author and narrator that returns issues of voice and tone to the imaginary locus of a “real” author who has “real” attitudes about preexistent “material.” When Frick suggests that “a narrator can never be truly objective or detached from his material,” the syntax locates this “material” as somehow something separate from, preexisting or otherwise outside of the narrator’s (or “authorial”’s) own imaginary. The chain this first sentence produces slides from the “authorial” to “a narrator” to “his material,” where the possessive “his” has an indefinite antecedent. Is this “material” the “authorial”’s or the narrator’s? Or does it belong to both? Or neither? Or are they really the same? Or are they different functions of the same persona? And where is this separable “material” insofar as it does not traceably preexist its rendition? While Frick’s sentence adjectivally finesses any definitive statement about the relation between author and narrator and



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leaves unresolved the character of associations among author, narrator, and “material” (presumably what is narrated), the second sentence of the passage does imply that the “whomever” to which this “his” refers is enacting a relation to material. “His” attitude is “the illusion of objectivity and detachment” (emphasis added). “He” (again whoever “he” is) “appears merely to record” the “events” that “he” is really ordering and controlling. The duplicities mount. The “authorial” assures that the “narrator” will feign an “objectivity and detachment” from “his material” (author’s or narrator’s) which “he” (author or narrator) is really controlling. This is essentially the hoaxic practice of bait-and-switch, especially insofar as the author and the narrator are not the same; the narrator is produced as such by the telling, and people, even authors, never say what they mean or mean what they say. They feign. Ironically, the sum total of all of this shifting and feigning is a conception of an author who is much more in control than we might otherwise have suspected. “He” pretends not to control what he controls, at the same time literally warranting—acting as some sort of security for—the position and attitude of a narrator located as a species of stand-in for the author, a contrived persona that nonetheless seems to have an independent existence insofar as we need to be assured of its objective and detached postures, which, it turns out, are only feigned. So what the “authorial” finally assures us of is that the narrator will do a good job feigning. This feigning, however, is not the pretense that there really is a narrator that precedes and somehow effects a text; it is a feigning about a figurative distance between the narrator and the “material” which itself represents a displacement from the issue of a figural (if any) distance between the “authorial” and the narrator. But since this “material” doesn’t exist before it appears as text, in its appearance producing the illusion of the narrator who seems to be inscribing preexistent events that never existed, the feigning in this instance is less about an attitude than it really is a question about origins: Is the narrator something the author feigns and controls? Is the narrator a figment produced as an effect of narration that both exceeds and deviates from any species of authorial sincerity? Can the “authorial” really guarantee anything about the narrator whose relation to the material betrays the fictional status of the material itself? All is feigned here: the “authorial,” the narrator, the “material.”

16 TONE

In his essay, Frick had previously described Waugh: “Traditionally, he has been known as the ‘self-effacing’ narrator (or ‘author’), a role in which the ‘author’ and narrator appear to be fused, with their identities virtually indistinguishable.”4 Again, the symptomatic slippage, this time from “narrator” back to “author” in parentheses and then in scare quotes, where the narrator becomes a “role,” coperformed by these two entities, “author” and “narrator,” who have “identities” that are “virtually indistinguishable,” even as author and narrator only “appear” to be fused, which suggests that they are not fused at all, but something else. What is an “identity” here? Is it simply the notion of sameness— “their identities virtually indistinguishable”—which, again ironically, suggests not only that a narrator has an “identity” but that its “identity” is separable from that of the author? This, in turn, suggests that somehow a narrator has the status of a persona, something with an “identity” in the sense that it knows who it is, has self-consciousness, etc. At a point earlier in his essay, Frick defines the characteristics of the narrators in Waugh’s early novels: “The narrator is an absent or submerged presence, a hidden observer who records the narrative action but remains ‘undramatized’ himself.”5 This subtle, narratorial feigning of the “authorial” may be the feigning that the illusion to which we ascribe the function of telling (an “author”) actually has some existence. And that this narrator’s existence is somehow both separate from but merged with the historical existence of an author who acts as a guarantor, as security that the narratorial persona will not become too detached, will not slip away, that, perhaps, traces of the author (qua “authorial”) remain inscribed in the telling. The apparent indeterminacy in Frick’s formulations about the relations among author (the “authorial”), narrator, and material (either the narrative or some imaginary of preexisting “events” the narrator presents) tends, in the end, to avoid much direct commentary on the issue of the tone of Waugh’s novels, even as Frick sees these novels as satirical and full of “comic irony.”6 In a way, Frick’s primary argument that Waugh’s “author” (narrator) is both “economical” and objective displaces the issue of tone into the imaginary of a figurative detachment feigned so as to seem the detachment it finally may not actually be, if indeed there were a literal person in the position of narrator in the first place. But perhaps the point is as well that the “author” slips away in this



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bait-and-switch. Or, the author is the controlling hoaxster. Or both. In either case, the essay’s constant displacement of the illusion of control from one source to another itself operates a slightly conning analysis of who it is who inscribes its “voice” in a novel. In substituting an issue of origins for any notion of how Waugh’s texts produce tone or what tone they produce, Frick’s essay avoids the tricky problem of tone altogether. The question may be why, when critics seem to offer considerations of tone, do we end up with some shifty interplay between author and narrator or both about who is hiding the pea—the pea being some concept of sincerity and control. This is especially shifty insofar as both the narrator and the “author” (implied or otherwise) exist only as an effect of the telling in the reader’s imagination. Frick’s essay illustrates some of the difficulties defining tone, as it focuses on an assumed source of a tone (imagined to reflect an imagined attitude) despite the likelihood that these “sources” are themselves produced as an effect of the text. Knowing the source would not account for the qualities or derivations of either tone or voice, whether these are the “authorial,” the narrator, or voice as an effect of the text. The notion of source persists in a reluctance to disbelieve the illusion of the narrator itself (to phrase in the style of Frick). These comments about the “authorial” and the narrator appear in the middle of Frick’s discussion of the characteristics of Waugh’s narrative style. Deploying Roman Jakobson’s concept of the dominant, as “the focusing component of a work of art: it rules, determines, transforms the remaining components,”7 Frick characterizes Waugh’s dominant as “omission and brevity,”8 which means, according to Frick’s reading of Waugh’s texts, that Waugh, as author, avoids too much “‘authorial’ commentary.”9 Such commentary, Frick implies, arrives through the function of the “narrator”: “The narrator cannot entirely dispense with some form of intrusive commentary, but the commentary is minimized according to a dominant principle.”10 The narrator is the damper for the author’s potential interference; its possible hyper-presence both produces and potentially subverts the “dominant” characteristic of the author’s style. In this sense, Frick is suggesting that the narrator stands in place of and yet also occludes an author by substituting one “identity” for another. This notion of a narratorial stand in who also stands in front of an author and that by so doing enables the author to avoid

18 TONE

interfering too much in the telling ironically reifies both the author and narrator’s function as agents controlling a telling. At the same time these two agents limit one another, the narrator holding the author back not as an over-engaged teller or even as the source of a text’s style but as an even more personable source for the telling. All of these imaginary politics of control bypass any sense that a text’s style, voice, and tone might be the products of an alluring and deceptive imaginary staged arrangement that in hovering behind a narrative, pretty much disappears. The problem this imaginary wrangling addresses is, in the end, not so much what might constitute tone as the audiated effect of a telling but instead the imaginary source of a “voice” that somehow emerges almost literally from these imaginary personae of “author” and “narrator,” offering a grounding source for tone. And from whence does “voice” emanate when one imaginary performer (the narrator) stands in for another (the author)? The arrangement actually produces the functions it pretends to arrange. The implied question in Frick’s work, finally, does not at all seem to be an issue of from whence the narrative’s voice or tone emanates, but a question of the reciprocal imaginary of where these imagined personae exist, figuratively, in relation to the “material” the text presents. This is still a description of a text’s tone via the projection of its imaginary source, but Frick’s account laudably (perhaps) so commingles its personae that the relegation of tone to source becomes the enactment of an unwillingness to let go—to let go of a traceable lineage between author and narrator, to relinquish the notion of a narrator’s “identity” so as to see the ways the narrator is itself a construction of the telling, a fiction in itself—in fact, a result of the feigning economy to which Frick’s analysis covertly resorts. And Frick’s own tone enacts the dynamic he is describing. Like Waugh’s author, the “voice” of Frick’s narration (assuming that in a critical argument the “authorial” and the narrator share a closer “identity” than in fiction), too, is “economical” and objective, the critic’s voice as such rarely intervening, but like the narrator of Waugh’s novels, quoting others as a way to guarantee that this authorial narrator is “objective” and detached. But in the case of Frick’s essay’s “voice,” this detachment does not produce irony (unless we see irony in a non-ironic essay about irony), but instead produces a tone—a seriousness that enacts the trustworthiness that secures the legitimacy of the essay’s argument and discussion.



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The tone is, as the essay’s commencement describes, “characterized by a severe economy of style and structure, an abbreviated form of literary expression that has been given the name ‘minimalism.’”11 This opening comment actually addresses “the early novels of Evelyn Waugh,” ending with a quilted term “minimalism” that it credits in a footnote to F. R. Karl’s 1983 study, American Fictions: 1940-1980, in a move that parallels the first sentence of Waugh’s Scoop (but without the appositive). Just as Frick’s exploration of the “attitude” of Waugh’s early novels offers an entangled inmixture of the “authorial” and the narrator, so Frick’s essay’s own performance of these elements offers a feature more like “voice.” In its performance as voice, this audiated but still imaginary narrator/speaker is imaginary in the sense that the very apprehension of voice derives from the text. The text does not act as a medium for the “communication” of the voice of the one we imagine is writing. Instead, the text produces the sense that someone wrote it. And, insofar as the text is the result of a writer’s deployment of syntax, diction, imagery, and so on, the text is not nor ever can be some straightforward reproduction of the writer as “speaker” who communicates itself. Instead, in its composition and rhetoric, the text effects the sense of a speaker as well as its “persona,” personality, attitude, mood, voice, and tone. As part of an audiated phenomenon, voice registers as misleadingly deixic to the source of the language, to the site from whence one might imagine the text emanates. In the case of Frick’s essay, this “voice” offers an imagined origin of the attitude enacted by the essay that guarantees the seriousness of its author whose position as published scholar in turn guarantees the seriousness of the “voice.” Insofar as voice weds the imaginaries of author and narrator together as the provisional response to the question of origin—and hence Frick’s wobbly reluctance to distinguish the two—tone would seem to rely more on the apt perceptions of the readers whose audiation of the tone of the “voice” produced in the writing offers a sense of the “voice”’s attitude in all meanings of the word. This attitude is not only a slant of an intellectual opinion or emotional reaction detected in the reader’s audiations of what the voice seems to be feeling (serious, snide, sneering, fond, forgiving, etc.) or the biases in its approach; it is also “attitude” in the sense of a figurative three-dimensional location: the relative distance, perspective, scale,

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and “objectivity” manifested in the text’s treatment of what it presents. Together, voice and tone produce the imaginary of an origin easily attributed to a writer who, the moment it inscribes a text, itself ceases to be an origin. The text’s production of a thirdperson narrator obscures this “author.” As a contrivance of the text, the narrator appears to speak as and for this origin. This imaginary substitution perpetuates both the sense of an audiated speaking persona and the origin of a narrative by constantly trading author and narrator, shifting from overt signs of narration to voice and tone and back. The one thing that will always be missing is the author itself, who persists only as an imaginary function that is imagined somewhere at some time to have fashioned the text that has left the author far behind. The origin or source of tone is simple: readers derive a sense of a speaking persona’s attitudes in their audiation of a written text. The text is the source. The ways in which texts produce tone, however, are much more complex insofar as it derives, as the opening of Scoop illustrates, from the complexities of the syntax, diction, connotations, and available information that we read without realizing the ways these elements generate the imaginary of an imaginary someone else’s feelings, perspectives, relations, etc. to the material on the page. And this is something we hear—in the imagination.

3 Tone Jam

Readers’ Theatre Dramatis personae: the Author, Molly Hite, Peter Rabinowitz, Wayne Booth

Scene 1 All are seated around an imaginary conference table in an imaginary seminar room. There may or may not be an audience in the room. Those who speak other than “the Author” read from published scholarly essays. As readers, these writers will orally interpret their own writing as they read from the page. The ostensible subject is “tone.” * * * MOLLY HITE: “I am concerned with experimental narratives with third-person narrators who deliberately make it difficult for readers to discern what evaluative stance they are supposed to have towards characters, events, or descriptions.”1 AUTHOR: How are we understanding the reader in this situation or for that matter the ostensible purposes of literature? How, too, are we understanding “third-person narrators” as having obligations, the capacity to be “deliberate,” or communicate “evaluative stances”? Why should narrators provide ethical guidance to readers? And more important, why do we attribute narrators, which are

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imaginary voices contrived by a text, with having “stances” at all? From whence does this “stance” derive? Clearly the Author has missed the discussions surrounding the “ethical turn” in narrative study. In her mind, this “ethical turn” itself has a tone which involves raising a finger while admonishing someone for something.2 MOLLY HITE: “By using third-person narrators who provide insufficient or contradictory tonal cues, Woolf enabled an intense concern with social categories without allowing attentive readers to slot narratorial observations into overall judgments of admiration or censure.”3 AUTHOR: So actually these third-person narrators’ failures to offer “tonal cues” is a good thing if we understand a part of the purpose of literature is to catalyze thought. Where do these tonal cues come from? Since the author is not present, what in the text produces these “tonal cues”? MOLLY HITE: “James Phelan has observed that tone is a quality of narrative voice that indicates the attitude the speaker has toward her or his subject.”4 AUTHOR: Which “speaker”? There is only text. The speaker is an imaginary extension of the audiation of language in a text. Isn’t that what produces “narrative voice”? Does “narrative voice” equal “the speaker”? Don’t you think it is interesting that analyses of narrators often refer to constructions imbued with narratorial duties (narrators, implied authors) as “speakers,” and the process of narrating as an oral instead of a written phenomenon? It is as if we receive all stories as being read to us. Somehow the text slips into a performance, a scene in which some persona is telling something to another. But both of these personae are fictions produced by the text itself. Res ipse loquitur. MOLLY HITE: “I suggest that one radically experimental effect of Woolf’s middle-period fiction arises from a calculated refusing or perplexing of authorial directions that would enable readers to take crucial elements of her narrative discourse: to assign what they perceive to be authorial sanctioned feelings and thus values to the main events and characters.”5



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AUTHOR: If they are reading a text, how do readers know the “voice” is Woolf’s? In what way are the narrators in Woolf’s novels not fictions? Why are they necessarily the opinions and feelings or even arguments of the historical author, Woolf? This is fiction. And why do readers necessarily care what the author they imagine is writing thinks they should think? We know from Derrida’s work that we can’t say what we mean.6 What in a text produces the sense that tone emanates from the author or an “implied author” or something we imagine to be the “author” as somehow standing behind and directing a narrator, even if the “author” wants to withhold opinions from readers? Why do we assume that any narrator reflects necessarily any author’s intentions?7 How does an author even know what his or her intentions are, and in any case, might authors not be a bit misled, not know what they are doing sometimes? All we have is the text. There is a such a thing as the unconscious. Have we become severely post-Freudian? MOLLY HITE: “In maintaining that Virginia Woolf’s fiction is remarkable for contradictory, absent, or muted tonal cues, I clearly do not mean only that Woolf shares the modernist penchant for irony and a distinct gap between narrator and subject matter. Irony and narrative distance often act as tonal cues, signaling the attitude a reader should have.”8 AUTHOR: So you envision the narrator as controlled by the author and therefore as a construction whose operation is deliberately contrived by an author so as to constitute a part of an ethical experience. MOLLY HITE: “No reader can have any question about how to take the general practitioner Holmes or the psychiatrist Sir William Bradshaw. Both try to treat Septimus Smith, and both thereby provoke his suicide. The narrative voice speaks directly about these two medical men, providing clear, thoroughly negative tonal cues—for example, metaphorizing Bradshaw as a bird of prey: ‘He swooped; he devoured. He shut people up.’”9 AUTHOR: I notice that you refer to the passage as deriving from a “narrative voice” that “speaks directly.” Although I know this is generally understood as a figurative mode of delivery for narrators, I am struck by the continued need

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to render narration as an aural (or oral) phenomenon, even though the tonal cues you point to here commingle metaphors of birds of prey with the more direct observation that Bradshaw “shut people up.” The mix of figure and action, especially an action aimed precisely at speech (presumably at any disagreement with him) produces more than the metaphor; the mix contributes to the production of the tone. But more important is the use of the phrase “narrative voice” to refer to the narrator. This is not simply a narrator, which is the illusion of a persona produced by the telling, but an even more specific “voice” linked to this narrator and also produced as an effect of telling. Why the aural figurations? (I know, I asked this before). (Pause) Why do we need so many different figurative agents and imaginary sources as a way to explain the ways the language of fiction conveys its diegesis? Why does a focus on source displace thinking about the ways literary texts might produce tone?

Interlude: A Moment with Wayne Booth The room darkens. A film of Wayne Booth appears on a screen that has lowered from the ceiling. The seminar room is thoroughly modernized, enough to make its institution proud. Even so, the film comes from a 16 mm projector. Old-style. For the moment. Wayne Booth is sitting in a chair, much like Alistair Cook in the older PBS Masterpiece Theatre series. He looks into the camera. * * * WAYNE BOOTH: I am reading from a section of my book, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Second Edition, from the section titled “Dramatized and Undramatized Narrators.” I begin this section: “Perhaps the most important differences in narrative effect depend on whether the narrator is dramatized in his own right and on whether his beliefs and characteristics are shared by the author.”10



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AUTHOR (whispers to Molly Hite): If all we have is the text, how do we know what the author thinks? But even more important, who cares? Doesn’t the text stand on its own? WAYNE BOOTH (continuing to read): “The implied author (the author’s “second self”)—even the novel in which no narrator is dramatized creates an implicit picture of an author who stands behind the scenes, whether as stage manager, a puppeteer, as an indifferent God, silently paring his fingernails. This implied author is always distinct from the ‘real man’— whatever we may take him to be—who creates a superior version of himself, a ‘second self,’ as he creates his work.”11 Author again whispers. The scene becomes reminiscent of Moon and Birdboot in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound.” Author says: Hmm, Booth is using metaphors from drama or even religion instead of sound here. So this must be a “dramatized narrator” if the “Implied Author” is a “stage manager.” So does this make the “real man” the playwright? WAYNE BOOTH (continuing to read): “Undramatized narrators.” AUTHOR (to no one in particular): Oh, we’re not even to the drama part yet. WAYNE BOOTH (continuing to read):  “Most tales are presented as passing through the consciousness of a teller, whether an ‘I’ or a ‘he.’ Even in drama much of what we are given is narrated by someone, [Author (whispering): Good grief! What plays has he been reading?] and we are often as much interested in the effect on the narrator’s own mind and heart as we are in learning what else the author has to tell us. In fiction, as soon as we encounter an ‘I,’ we are conscious of an experiencing mind whose views of the experience will come between us and the event.”12 AUTHOR (mostly to self): But the teller is an illusion effected by the telling. Fiction produces the illusion of a witness/ raconteur; such a teller does not actually recount the story. It’s FICTION. There are no events for the “experienced mind” to come between. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Shhhh!! WAYNE BOOTH (continuing to read): “Dramatized narrators—In a sense even the most reticent narrator has

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been dramatized as soon as he refers to himself as ‘I,’ or, like Flaubert, tells us that ‘we’ were in the classroom when Charles Bovary entered. But many novels dramatize their narrators with great fullness, making them into characters as vivid as those they tell about . . . . In such works the narrator is often radically different from the implied author who creates him.”13 The film breaks and runs flipping through the projector. Those in the room are surprised to see an actual projector. Few of them stopped to realize that the Wayne Booth they had been watching was, as André Bazin would define it, a direct trace of the real Wayne Booth insofar as the image of Booth on the film derived from a traceable line to the light waves bouncing off of Booth’s body onto the film.14 Author utters, “Bazin!” And realizes, though does not voice it, that the relation between the visible figure of Booth on film and the real figure in life was absolutely not analogous to the relation between author and text in her mind, but completely analogous to the account Booth had been developing, though, of course, he could not have realized that. Instead, in this reading from his own book, Booth was deploying theatrical metaphors, which actually implied not only layers of personae (instead of film’s reflective automatism) but also far more control on the part of each layer. The net effect of Booth’s schema was, in the Author’s mind, that all authors of fiction are really playwrights, in which case how could anyone ever talk about authorial “intention”? Had these literati ever been in a play?

Scene 2 The lights go back on in the seminar room. The participants blink. * * * MALE PARTICIPANT: I went into fiction because I don’t like drama. Others laugh briefly. AUTHOR (whispering audibly): The stage metaphor is a metaphor of control which is not necessarily a part of any



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reading experience. None of this is a feature of performed plays with their multiple layers of interpretation and audience interaction. What concept of the theatre does Booth have? How do we discern these imaginary writing figures? Where do they make themselves apparent? PETER RABINOWITZ: “The implied author is not a mere theoretical abstraction created by the reader, it is (assumed to be) something created (at least partly consciously) by the real author in the same way that he or she creates characters and plots.”15 AUTHOR: It is evident from Professor Booth’s comments that he certainly thinks so. But now, of course, we are attributing Professor’s Booth’s critical opinions to Professor Booth. Why can we even make that little leap? PETER RABINOWITZ: “But the implied author is more than a circumlocution that allows us to bring talk of intention into polite society. The implied author is also (and this became more important to Booth as time passed) a way of thinking about how authors choose to present themselves. This is where biography, in the most general sense, comes in.”16 AUTHOR: My question is what unconscious desire on the part of critics the notion of “intention” represents. Wellek and Warren were right in the 50s. The mania to attribute and to deploy biographical criticism as a forensic tool to discern “meaning” indirectly is less about any text than it is still a question of origins and a bit of identification with a real life figure whom we know only as a fiction. All of this avoids the text itself in favor of layers of “author”-ity, which, it turns out is all about authority in critical practice. We are never in control of words. They speak without us. If they didn’t, no text would outlive its own time.

Interlude 2: Another Moment with Wayne Booth Again the screen descends and another film commences. Wayne Booth is walking along the shore of Lake Michigan in Chicago. * * *

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WAYNE BOOTH: “The many ‘Observers and Narrator-Agents’ . . . Providing . . . ‘Scene and Summary’ . . . ‘Commentary’. . . (Booth continues to walk) . . . Some are ‘Self-conscious.’”17 Booth stops and looks straight into the camera “Whether or not they are involved in the action as agents or as sufferers, narrators, and third-person reflectors differ markedly according to the degree and kind of distance that separates them from the author, the reader, and the other characters in the story. In any reading experience there is an implied dialogue among author, narrator, the other characters, and the reader.”18 AUTHOR (again as an aside): “But all of this is produced as an effect of the text—why this mania to dramatize? . . . Is this a heuristic process? Instructional? How does a text signal ‘distance’ which is itself a metaphor of something . . . ?” There are various hustings as “Shhhhhh’s” around the room. The Author sits back and folds her arms. The film continues as Booth begins to walk along the lake shore again. WAYNE BOOTH: “The elements usually discussed under ‘aesthetic distance’ enter in of course; distance in time and space, differences of social class or conventions of speech or dress—these and many others serve to control our sense that we are dealing with an aesthetic object, just as the paper moons and other unrealistic stage effects of some modern drama have had an ‘alienation’ effect.’”19 AUTHOR (aloud): “Paper moons”? Again, stage effects? “Alienation effect”? This isn’t Brechtian. Why these odd analogies? Distance as a metaphor itself elucidated by another metaphor—or should I say ‘illuminated’? There is no space of any kind in a text. Am I crazy?” More hushings. Someone says: “I’m trying to watch the film.” The Author’s plaints have made them miss some of the film. Booth is still walking on the shore.



TONE JAM

29

WAYNE BOOTH: “Narrator . . . More or less distant from the implied author . . . The characters . . . Reader’s own norms . . . The reader . . . carrying the reader with him distant from other characters . . . [Booth stops and looks straight into the camera] For practical criticism probably the most important of these kinds of distance is that between the fallible or unreliable narrator and the implied author who carries the reader with him in judging the narrator . . . .”20 The projector’s light bulb blows out with a loud “POP.” The seminar participants are startled. The lights go on in the room. AUTHOR: “No wonder he uses metaphors from theatre. So much drama among imaginary entities in the recounting of imaginary events. It’s a miracle we have fiction at all. All of these imaginary personae exist in a soap opera. Maybe a better analogy would be television.”

Scene 3 The Seminar room darkens. As there are no windows, it becomes black. Suddenly, a recording begins. It is David Sedaris reading “Six to Eight Black Men.” * * *

30

4 Intoning

What really interests me are the local gun laws. Can I carry a concealed weapon and, if so, under what circumstances? What is the waiting period for a tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job? I’ve learned from experience that it’s best to lead into this subject as delicately as possible, especially if you and the local citizen are alone and enclosed in a relatively small area. Bide your time though, and you can walk away with some excellent stories. I’ve learned, for example, that the blind can legally hunt in both Texas and Michigan. In Texas they must be accompanied by a sighted companion, but I heard that in Michigan they’re allowed to go it alone, which raises the question: How do they find whatever it is they just shot? In addition to that, how do they get it home? Are the Michigan blind allowed to drive as well? I ask about guns not because I want one of my own but because the answers vary so widely from state to state. In a country that’s become increasingly homogeneous, I’m reassured by these last charming touches of regionalism.1 This man is funny as hell, even more so in person. Even he admits it—“These things were written to be read,” he said of his stories.2 We “hear” written words in our head.3

32 TONE

David and Calliope David Sedaris is the “author,” “implied author,” “first-person narrator,” and character of Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004). A collection of essays focusing on the experiences and observations of a character/narrator, David Sedaris, Dress Your Family recounts the observations of situations and experiences the character “Sedaris” encounters. As an example of how the many different imaginary origins of literary “voice” critics evoke—narrator, implied author, author—seem to merge into one all-purpose “real live boy,” Sedaris’s writing might, perhaps ironically, also exemplify the ways tone derived from the text enacts voice, the personae of the narrator, and, in the case of Sedaris’s autobiographical scrivening, the text’s performance of the imaginary author, Sedaris, himself, who in a gorgeous rebound, becomes the performing persona of the text as he performs it. Sedaris is so very Sedaris and yet not Sedaris at all. A popular speaker and the reader of the audiobook versions of his work, it is difficult to separate Sedaris’s real, living voice (though it is most often a recorded version thereof) from the inscribed voice of his texts. If one has listened to an audio book, it is difficult to read his essays without imagining that same voice. Literal voice becomes textual voice; tone is intoned. The audio Sedaris would seem to embody the ideal model for the source of a narrative “voice,” as the author reads as “author,” voicing the narrator, who is also the “author” or “implied author” (or both), with the author, “author,” “implied author,” “narrator”’s voice emanating from the author’s physically present body.4 This set-up would seem to offer the perfect staging in a one-man performance, unless, of course, one is listening to an audiobook or a recording of a live performance, where the “presence” of the author is already at a remove similar to that formulated between author and “implied author.”5 The recorded readings enact what we might imagine the originary relationship is between “voice” and its imagined source, but not as confirmation of the various critical rehearsals of vocal source would suggest. When it appears as if we might have some sort of proof that all of these author/narrator personae are aligned, what occurs instead is a performance.6 Sedaris’s public readings may secure an imaginary relationship among all of the imaginary sources of the text’s discourse, but his reading of the text is the same as everyone else’s. Sedaris is a reader reading a text whose language

INTONING  33

produces the tone Sedaris reproduces. It is never the same Sedaris. After he has written his essays, Sedaris has no more privileged relationship to these texts than any other reader.7 Happily for his listeners, Sedaris is a superb reader of his own texts, not because he wrote them but because he can channel their voice and tone, and not because it was originally his voice and tone but because the language itself enacts a tone that Sedaris is very good at reproducing. If one listens to Sedaris’s audiobooks, it is difficult to imagine any other voice reading them. But would readers unexposed to Sedaris’s reading voice hear the same voice as they read the text anyway? Or something like it? Or are any of the documented Sedaris-originated voices the same as the “voice” in the text, which may, in fact, vary from Sedaris’s physical voice, just as Sedaris’s narrator is not necessarily the “real” Sedaris, but the firstperson narrator/character “Sedaris”? How would we know? And, what difference does it make, and why does most criticism assume the convergence of these imaginary origins? The difference (to address the second question first) is the difference between treating Sedaris’s essays as humorous personal experience contrived with little art but a lot of the author’s personality and seeing the essays themselves as complex exemplars of art. As of December 2017, there are fewer than ten critical essays treating Sedaris’s writing and one scholarly tome listed in the MLA Bibliography.8 Most of the material listed (in addition to critical work) consists of author-centered interviews, reviews, and how to use non-fiction prose in composition classes. These essays accept the “identity” of Sedaris and Sedaris, as if Sedaris’s work really fools people who, in running quickly up the line of narratorial functions (character, narrator, implied narrator, implied author, author), collapse these functions into one living being. But if we understand that the language of the texts (instead of the author) generates both voice and tone, then the text itself produces the illusion of a narrator that the return of the living, reading Sedaris seems to confirm. Sedaris’s writing appeals to and reveals the audiated bases of reading. Any analysis of Sedaris’s texts is, thus, an analysis of the text itself instead of a search for origins (especially since the origins seem to be so clearly in front of us). If we did not already know this (although many often ignore it or seem unaware), we “hear” or audiate what we read, imagining the sound of words and images. According to Edwin Gordon, a

34 TONE

musicologist and educator, audiation “takes place when we hear and comprehend music for which the sound is no longer or may never have been present.” Gordon continues, “Although music is not a language, the process is the same for audiating and giving meaning to music as for thinking and giving meaning to speech.”9 The process is the same for thinking and giving meaning to language. Neuroscientists have also shown that audiation accompanies reading.10 We hear words when we read; part of reading a sentence is also aurally apprehending what the syntax, diction, and context convey about how the imagined speaker of the text is speaking. That Sedaris’s texts’ aural performances double down on the author/narrator/character as the undeniable “source” of his text’s voice and tone merely exacerbates Sedaris’s texts’ enactments of narrator-as-character’s personality and its wry relationship to the narrative, which is, in the end, a narrative about producing the character/narrator as simultaneously experiencing and commenting upon the cultural and familial oddities it renders. The character/ narrator is a multiply split voice that layers sincerity, winking savvy, innocence, sardonic critique, straight-man duplicity, and appreciation for absurdity all at once. This layered voice enacts a perpetually modulating relation between content and tone, which then produces a sense of the character/narrator as the covertly intrigued yet already perverse observer who takes its observations seriously, while also pretending seriousness. No matter where the text’s voice is at any given point in a narrative, its tone is always also somewhere else and in a second again somewhere else altogether. Tone shifts, while the imaginary of a voice remains more constant. The text’s production of this prismatic narrator/character who seems at once temporally distanced, intimately aware of his own foibles, and yet capable of apparently sincerely producing the character’s voice as simultaneously credulous and ironic is itself the anatomy of the ways language produces both voice and tone as interconstitutive effects of the text. Our sense of this, however, only emerges because of audiation, not because we hear Sedaris reading the text. When we audiate such layered tone, we hear it multiply, in contradiction to itself, often retroactively realizing its play on itself. Audiation is, thus, not only hearing what we read as we read; it also involves a perpetual retroactive re-audiation as parts of text continue to reverberate.11

INTONING  35

Sedaris ≃ Sedaris I’ve never been much for guidebooks, so when trying to get my bearings in a strange American city, I normally start by asking the cab driver or hotel clerk some silly question regarding the latest census figures. I say silly because I don’t really care how many people live in Olympia, Washington, or Columbus, Ohio. They’re nice enough places, but the numbers mean nothing to me. My second question might have to do with average annual rainfall, which, again, doesn’t tell me anything about the people who have chosen to call this place home.12 The first paragraph of Sedaris’s essay “Six to Eight Black Men” offers a specific example of what the narrator/character describes as his process of getting “my bearings” when he is in “some strange American city.”13 Commencing with a confessional tone, the essay confides examples of questions the narrator/character asks which don’t tell him “anything about the people who have chosen to call this place home.”14 The essay begins with the acknowledgment that “I’ve never been much for guidebooks, so when trying to get my bearings in some strange American city, I normally start by asking the cabdriver or hotel clerk some silly question regarding the latest census figures.”15 The first-person admission that the narrator is not “much for guidebooks” leads to another revelation: he asks a local person in “some strange American city” some “silly question.” The adjectives “strange” and “silly” redound to both the question and its poser, although at first, they seem idiosyncratic matter for the character/narrator’s confession. The text quickly amends the characterization of silly: “I say ‘silly’ because I really don’t care how many people live in Olympia, Washington or Columbus, Ohio.”16 Bringing into question exactly what the text is modifying as “silly,” the narrator simultaneously locates the “silly” to himself as the one who asks questions whose answers are irrelevant to him. Having confessed the narrator’s silliness, the text then displaces that silliness onto the questions themselves as aspects both of the narrator/character’s initial estrangement and the strangeness of his environment. The second paragraph gets to the nitty-gritty: “What really interests me are the local gun laws.”17 While the essay’s opening questions are more mundane than silly, what is really silly (while

36 TONE

the text poises them as more interesting) are the questions about local gun laws: “Can I carry a concealed weapon and, if so, under what circumstances? What’s the waiting period for a tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job?”18 Already tone and voice align and collide, wavering from collusion to a dissonance that offers a little shock, an astute social commentary (in America gun laws may well be on a par with census figures and the amount of annual rainfall), as well as announcing an interest that rebounds (but maybe not really) to the character of the narrator/ character whose tone of voice equates gun laws with census, but also, and at the same time, not really. In contrast to “silly” queries about “census figures” and “average local rainfall,” the subject of gun laws seems an abrupt shift to a kind of perverse voyeurism, a different mode of silliness or perhaps strangeness, though at the same time, the text persists with its confiding, matter-of-fact tone, equating the mundane with the narrower concerns of a population often considered a bit too avid about its hobbies. In contrast to the queries the text characterizes as “silly” in the earlier quotation—and which still reverberate tonally—these questions about gun laws are perhaps more “strange,” insofar as they shift the personae of the narrator/character from a mere tourist to something more like either (a) someone unusually afraid of assault with weapons or (b) someone interested in weapons. The contrast produces an instant splitting that is not reflected in either tone or voice (as these stay the same), but in an apprehension of the character/narrator itself as the second set of questions resounds with the first, producing the sense of a voice that is not what it may have seemed to have been at any given point. Although for a moment, the character of this character/narrator is up in the air, the text quickly resolves the problem with the next line: “I’ve learned from experience that it’s best to lead into this subject as delicately as possible, especially if you and the local citizen are alone and enclosed in a relatively small area.”19 The confiding tone continues, especially in the phrase “I’ve learned from experience” and the use of second-person address. In this instance, the advice offers a hint about desirable context. But the text also confides more than it denotes, implying that the narrator/character has asked this same set of questions before and not always with a friendly reception. Retroactively, the statement’s understatement— “best to lead into this subject as delicately as possible”—opens

INTONING  37

out the layers of the tonality from its superficial feel of confiding friendly advice to the adverb, “delicately”’s affording obvious meiosis (in fact, quite “delicately”), and the darker indirect threat implied by avoiding “relatively small areas” where “relatively”’s adjectival qualification simultaneously neutralizes the implied danger and offers a technical hint from experience that implies that the character/narrator knows just what size area might be safe. The difference in tone the mention of gun laws introduces retroactively parses the tone’s layerings, which were already operating in the essay’s opening paragraph. This parsing actually works as a way of showing that even the Sedaris character/narrator is not the Sedaris character/narrator the text appears to establish, that no voice is what it presents itself to be (or is constructed as by the text), that tone is in itself already a complex evocation of multiple simultaneous attitudes that any single oral reading will merely interpret. The text is always more than the performance. The tone of Sedaris’s essay is not simply a kind of irony where the voice and tone contrast with what the text denotes. The tonal layering enacts a range of coexisting postures and attitudes from the matterof-fact to the confessionally perverse that constantly shift back and forth, cross, and sound together in harmony and dissonance. We audiate them all at once—the complexity of “tone” playing out as complexity, humor, seriousness, sincerity, self-mockery, and incredulity at the absurdity of it all. Produced in the obviously enacted conflict between what the text says, that is, “local gun laws,” and the way it presents it (as just another local statistic), this multiply-signifying layered cacophony of tones redacts to a narrating character whose apparent firstparagraph friendly detachment is undergirded by a fascination with the potentially tabloid and a series of potential investments the opening tone belies. Beginning with a solo, an apparently single voice and tone, the audiated line fans out into a chorus of conflicting possibilities, both dissonant and strangely consonant at once. Confessional, confidential, sincere, and, wait, we discover, fascinated with the more “equipped” elements of culture (the hint of this fascination signified by the introduction of gun laws), it produces an even more confidential tone insofar as the narrator is exposing an interest in a topic that shifts registers from statistics to a set of potential entitlements that themselves represent a diversity of motivations. Although the text links the gun laws to other mere

38 TONE

information, the shift to gun laws rebounds to the opening remarks about being in a “strange American city” where the meaning of the adjective “strange” suddenly alters from simply foreign to the potentially dangerous. The list of specific questions about gun laws, which, though it seems to lead away from the “silly” statistical queries with which the essay began, leads finally—and importantly via the mock/real seriousness of questions about gun ownership—into truly silly laws that offer rationales for any visitor’s estrangement. To repeat: Bide your time though, and you can walk away with some excellent stories. I’ve learned, for example, that the blind can legally hunt in both Texas and Michigan. In Texas they must be accompanied by a sighted companion, but I heard that in Michigan they’re allowed to go it alone, which raises the question: How do they find whatever it is they just shot? In addition to that, how do they get it home? Are the Michigan blind allowed to drive as well? I ask about guns not because I want one of my own but because the answers vary so widely from state to state. In a country that’s become increasingly homogeneous, I’m reassured by these last charming touches of regionalism.20 Tonally, the sequitur is not something “silly,” but one among “some excellent stories.” Gun laws morph into “stories” after this stran​ ger-t​urned​-coll​ector​-of-s​tatis​tics-​turne​d-col​lecto​r-of-​gun-r​egula​ tions​has worked out the kinks of being a stranger in a “strange American city.” Turning again to second person, the opening phrase of this section is advice, a suggestion, about timing, which also applies to this chapter itself. The essay produces its tone partly by means of predisposing certain attitudes (i.e., “strange,” “silly”) then shifting their application and meaning in subsequent observations. The essay constantly reverberates its own adjectives, while perpetually altering their valence. The passage that presents “some excellent stories” redefines the notion of “local gun laws” by merging any conception of those laws (as exemplified by the text’s initial questions) with the absurdity of blind hunters. The text deploys the verbs “I’ve learned” and “I’ve heard,” both of which suggest already that this newest redefinition of local information is, as all the rest has been, oral. In reading the text, readers audiate that the narrator has “learned” that “the blind

INTONING  39

can legally hunt in Texas and Michigan,” a process further specified by his declaring that “I’ve heard that in Michigan they’re allowed to go it alone.” The first apparent silly absurdity—that the blind “can legally hunt”—is topped by a second even greater inanity. The text continues by raising, in a way that enacts tonal earnestness as if the prospect of a blind hunter is a real circumstance for which to account, practical questions about the actual experience of blind hunters. These questions retroactively recalibrate the superficial matter-offact tone of the proclamation that the blind can hunt to match the absurdity of the follow-up question to come: “Are the Michigan blind allowed to drive as well?” As the tone remains superficially matter-of-fact and the content becomes increasingly absurd, how we audiate the tone changes from the merely informational to a range of potential attitudes sparked by filling out the scenario: absurdity, irony, hilarity, biting commentary, disapproval. Again, this bubbling variety of possibilities transpires in audiation; Sedaris’s performance of the text moors its tone(s) within a selected range. Performance narrows, although it can also suggest interpretations individual audiation may not have discerned. The concluding benediction of this introductory gambit into the question of familiarizing oneself with a strange locale remarks: “I ask about guns not because I want one of my own but because the answers vary so widely from state to state. In a country that’s become increasingly homogeneous, I’m reassured by these last charming touches of regionalism.”21 Resolving questions about the narrator’s own predilections raised by his discussion of gun laws, the narrator links the question of gun ownership to its probative value as an indicator of local personality. In this statement, the tone returns to its matter-of-fact informational quest and the sentence appears to disassociate the narrator from any investment in firearms. The final sentence, however, reparses tone into a new exhibition of layered commentary. The adjective “charming” applied to blind hunters as a characterization of “regionalism” offers multiple attitudes simultaneously: irony, sincerity, derogation, parody of informational pamphlets, etc. The tonal shifting in the first two paragraphs of “Six to Eight Black Men” not only sets the layered tonality of the rest of the essay but also signals the multiple ironies that characterize the essay’s main subject: the ways the Dutch celebrate Christmas. Having established a tone that opens out from matter-of-fact to incredulous, from serious to ironic, from fact to

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understatement within a narrative that always seems to one-up itself in absurdity, the first two paragraphs enact the range of tonal lines that blend, clash, resound, recall, and reverberate through the rest of essay and, the ultimate effect, is not unsurprisingly, comedy. David Sedaris is a masterful performer of his own works, able to personify much of the range of tonal complexity his essays offer. But the fact that the author performs so well also shows the ways that his essays are always more than he says, more tonally complex than any one person can perform, more variable than a single enactment can ever show. But Sedaris’s performances also show the extent to which his writing depends upon its complexities of tone, as itself the major source of any sense of the narrator/character’s persona, personality, foibles, and wit. Tone produces the sense of voice which produces the sense of a narrator which produces the sense of a firstperson narrating persona which produces a sense of the fictional author narrating, which all collide with but never merge as David Sedaris. And, this parsing of textual voices, narratorial personae, and authors is the case for every author and every text.

5 Taking That Tone

But holy Mama of God, a project by that senile orangehead Strom Thurmond? A History of the African-American People? I mean, it’s not a bad idea for a satire, but even there it sounds more like a Saturday Night Live skit. And you make it clear this is no satire. I am reasonably sure you do exist. I looked you up in a directory, figuring this was a prank; but there you were.1 —Letter from Percival Everett to Simon & Schuster editor Martin Snell, August 29, 2002, 49

From: [email protected] 

December 21, 2017

To: W. A-L [email protected] Dear Walt, Man, you have a hard job, translating that Everett/Kincaid thing. Do French people ever even talk like that? Funny how authors sound one way in person, another way in “serious” novels, and then here . . . well. Great performances, if they are performances. Maybe these are the “real” people, letting loose for once. And we only think they are put on because we are so used to their implied authorial voices and drag public personae. No wonder it took so long for anyone to decide to translate this into French.

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Good luck!!! At least if you were working today, it would be mostly in the dark. Salut ! Judith * * * From: W. A-L [email protected]

December 22, 2017

To: [email protected] Chère Judith, Translating is always a challenge and letters are even worse, though in the 18th century novels began as epistolary endeavors. The writing of letters offers the means for characterization. I apologize for being so instructional, but I have to locate the task somewhere that makes sense. In epistolary novels, tone was personality, the inscription of a persona who came into being as an effect of the letter’s style. I wanted to translate this crazy novel because it is refreshing to see that in the 21st century the epistolary practice has not yet died out. And those two, Percival and Kincaid, are not the real challenge, although maybe they are in a way because I know one of them pretty well. That might make it plus difficile. We’ll see how I do. I’ve never even met anyone like this Barton character. Have you? Is this some American type? Maybe I don’t socialize with the right people. Maybe this is what familiarity with politicians breeds. In any case, there is a market for Everett novels here, I just don’t know if anyone here remembers or ever even knew who Strom Thurmond is? . . . Was? Love, Walt P.S. How do I ever translate this?—“But holy Mama of God, a project by that senile orangehead Strom Thurmond?” What’s an “orangehead”? Tête d’orange? * * *



TAKING THAT TONE

From: W. A-L [email protected]

43

December 22, 2017

To: [email protected] Chère Judith, Just a quick note: how does this sound as the promo line to translate?—“A modern exploration of the capacities of the epistolary novel, revivified by two contemporary authors, Percival Everett and James Kincaid, in the correspondence surrounding the production of A History of the African-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond (2004). This novel consists of a collection of letters, inter-office memoranda, interviews, and notes, presenting the entire saga in the unwitting first-person tones of a cast of players with personalities ranging from the wildly eccentric to those who seem normal in comparison.” I am usually not this stymied: I need a quick push!!! Merci en avance ! Walt * * * From: [email protected]

December 22, 2017

To: W. A-L [email protected] Hey, Walt! You are probably in bed—I didn’t get your note until late. I wouldn’t say “capacities.” Maybe “virtues?” I might also say, “It presents the entire saga as it happened in documents representing all aspects of the publishing industry.” I know, boring, but hey . . . “Unwitting first-person tones” aims more at the intelligentsia. But, then again, who do we imagine is going to read this? And “normal in comparison”? I think I would say “professional writers parodying themselves,” whatever that means. Good luck again!!! Avec amitié, Judith * * *

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From: W. A-L [email protected]

December 25, 2017

To: [email protected] Chère Judith, A Christmas present!! Can you just give me a sense of what the tone is in the passage below from the point of view of an American? I think I have it, but I want to make sure. This is the first appearance of Percival as a letter writer in the novel. I think I am treating Barton (Button? Bar-Bar? Blanton?) justly, but authors—and especially authors I know—are a whole different question. That the nominal “authors” of this collection of documents are “Percival Everett” and “James Kincaid” conflates the novel with history insofar as the two “authors” are re-produced by means of their respective tones in the letters to which their names are appended. Unlike La Réligieuse or any number of characters in a plethora of 18th c. French novels, Everett and Kincaid’s text signifies on both sides of the page. It is just difficult to ignore this. Sorry for the mini-lecture. It is where I go when I am trying to discern what choices to make. Here is the passage: And why me? Well, never mind that. I gather you wanted a genuine person of color. A black person giving some kind of legitimacy to the number-one racist in the last century: now there’s a proposition to make me jump up and shout, “Yassuh!” But what the hell, the idea of states’ rights always interested me, and Thurmond got where he did by differentiating himself from “vulgar racists.” I expect he’s sincere in what he says about himself, that he has taught himself to believe he has always had the best interests of the nigra and the Constitution at heart. There’s something appealing about the quality of that self-deception, that sublime idiocy. It’d be interesting to see what could be done to allow his history to proceed without condemning itself obviously from the first page. —letter from Percival Everett to Simon & Schuster editor Martin Snell, August 29, 2002, p. 49 I assume this character (it is certainly not the author—Percival doesn’t talk like this) is being snide? Or is he truly outraged? But I know this is supposed to be funny, so . . . You see my dilemma.



TAKING THAT TONE

45

What kind of character does this passage produce? I appreciate any insight you might have, especially about the relative value of the references to African-American people—Ha! That’s the title! J’espère que tu aies un joyeux Noel! Ton amie, Walt * * * From: [email protected]

December 23, 2017

To: W. A-L [email protected] Chère Walt, Treat Barton “justly”? You’re kidding! But seriously. Consider this your Christmas present en lieu de quelque chose plus amusante. In this missive, the Percival character is responding to an invitation from the Simon & Schuster editor, Snell. In asking why the press approached him, Percival (or should I say “Percival”? Pretend the scare quotes surround every appearance of the name that follows) deploys a series of racial synonyms or terms associated with racism, each of which offers a dual tone (as if these were also in scare quotes)—“genuine person of color,” “Yassuh” (I’ll come back to this one), “vulgar racists,” and “nigra.” The first of these, “genuine person of color” connotes racial authenticity, but in the context also implies and suggestively derogates the practice of employing “token” AfricanAmericans as a way to legitimate otherwise racist projects. The letter says as much in the ensuing line, as “Percival” openly accuses the editor of wanting to employ a “genuine person of color” as a way to “legitimate” what “the number one racist in the country” says. But he follows this accusation (suggestion? observation?) up with a phrase that assumes, parodies and takes on the characteristics of a “person of color” as apprehended by a racist, so that “there’s a proposition to make me jump up and shout, ‘Yassuh!’” is really a sarcastic rejoinder that echoes “genuine person of color,” but multiplies it by adding the “Yassuh” which is making fun of the way African-American speech itself was presented in racist texts and films. This sentence actually reverses its meaning while seeming to offer a positive endorsement— now that IS sarcasm.

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In suggesting that “states’ rights” always “interested” him, “Percival” seems to align himself momentarily with Thurmond, but Percival’s statement is ambivalent, meaning it could be that “Percival” was interested in the matter from the opposite perspective, which makes the admission of interest perhaps a little snide or again, sarcastic, but tinged with an evenhanded delivery—the pretension of an almost academic investment that enables the impression of a feigned seriousness that produces the commentary’s sarcasm in the first place. In noting that Thurmond distinguishes himself from mere “vulgar racists,” “Percival” implies simultaneously that Thurmond is even more vulgar than a vulgar racist and/or that he deludes himself by thinking he is anything but a vulgar racist. In suggesting that Thurmond believes he is not a racist while being a vulgar racist and that he has the “best interests of the nigra and the Constitution at heart,” “Percival” is showing both Thurmond’s ignorance and his hypocrisy, especially in using the term “nigra,” an anachronistic term used only by American Southerners of previous generations to refer to people of color. Calling all of this “self-deception,” the last line of this paragraph actually lays out the “geometry” of the paragraph’s tone: “It’d be interesting to see what could be done to allow his history to proceed without condemning itself obviously from the first page.” Just as he has signaled throughout the paragraph, the proposed project is already condemned as a bad idea, and “Percival” is snidely interested in seeing how it could be otherwise. This enacts the persona “Percival” as a dubious observer, above insult (while aware of the implied insults), who responds by refusing to say “Yassuh” while pointing out that such a response might be expected from those who are not familiar with “Percival” as an intellectual aware of the racism of the suggestion. But at the same time, amused by the ignorant pretension of the editor, “Percival,” in his position as he-who-sees-the-terrain, also wants to sustain his superiority over the “vulgar racists” by witnessing how the project itself plays out as anything other than racist. For “Percival,” this is, by implication, an impossibility. Hence, “Percival” sets himself up to be the amused onlooker/participant in the proposed absurdity without appearing to be anything other than polite. In addition to this complex sarcasm (for lack of a better word— because the sarcasm is veiled beneath a kind of poised-as-beneficent humor), the tone of this paragraph is simultaneously informal and intellectual, which demonstrates “Percival”’s ease with his position as intelligentsia, a position which accounts not only for



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his perceptiveness but also for his seeming ability to recognize and proclaim racism while also refraining from overt anger and insult. “Percival” is insulting both to the publisher and Thurmond, but in a way so indirect that it appears to dance just this side of any direct encounter and redound to the amusement of “Percival” himself. Hence, the paragraph has a vague tone of amusement, intellectual superiority, tolerant intolerance, and a smidgeon of fake humility. If I were you, I would focus on getting those racial terms just right and reproducing the ways the syntax tends to produce sentences in which the meaning is reversed—i.e., the second sentence or the final sentence—that are heavy with sarcasm. I don’t know if there is any way you can translate the “Old South” into something equivalent in French. Maybe “Plantation culture”? I don’t envy you this task. One idea might be to watch a few racist Hollywood films from the Thurmond era to get a sense of the tone that the “Percival” persona is playing with. Maybe In the Heat of the Night or Driving Miss Daisy. Sorry for the “explication du text.” Man, the job of translator, especially with work so—how to say it? Blushed? Tinged? Auratic?—with subtleties as Percival’s. Let me know if you need more cultural hints—Is Kincaid as difficult as Everett? XOXO Judith * * * From: W. A-L [email protected]

December 26, 2017

To: [email protected] You know I have never had trouble (well, not this kind) translating Percival’s novels, even those that evince his persona (like Erasure). Percival’s first person narrators usually bespeak their personae (Is “bespeak” the right word?). In this novel, the letters seem like doublespeak. Or doublebespeak. They seem as if they are the text producing the sense of voice and personality which is producing another sense of voice and personality. Like Percival joking about Percival. Wouldn’t it be funny if Kincaid actually wrote the Percival notes and vice versa? But why not? The letters are a Percival persona producing a parody Percival persona and somehow both

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are there. I wonder if you could explicate that? So, somehow, I have to be a third, completely transparent “voice” translating the Percival persona producing the parody Percival, leaving all of the traces intact. But the problem is what the traces are. Arghhhhh! (That is the American phrase, I believe.) Avec l’amitié, WALT * * * From: [email protected]

December 26, 2017

To: W. A-L [email protected] WALT!!!! (You signed in all caps?) Why are you up so early? Is one holiday too much for you? You are indeed assiduous! Close-read a place where the Percival persona makes evident that it is a persona writing a persona? Isn’t that parody? Or satire (I get them mixed up). Okay, how about this: You want me to get a helper. OK. I don’t know any historians that would do it. A guy here, Jim Kincaid, would do it. He knows nothing of history (he’s in the English Department, which tells you a lot), but he is heedless and writes a lot. Besides that, he has little on his plate, so I could count on him to do a lot of the grunt work.2 Notice that the phrase “a lot” is in there a lot—three times. This is obviously the Percival persona producing a Percival persona to make fun of the Kincaid persona, which signals the persona’s parodic duplicity (how do you like that phrase?) by taking on extreme informality—i.e., the repetition of “a lot.” First, suggesting that this “Kincaid” doesn’t know anything about history, which signals itself as a joke by referring to the popular perception of the knowledge base of English department personnel (assuming there is one—popular perception, not base), then describing Kincaid as “heedless” but that he “writes a lot,” implying that he writes a lot about not much, another parodic critique of the critiques leveled at English Professors. Because we know that two authors named “Everett” and Kincaid” collaborated on this book, these jibes must be in jest and hence comprise a joke on



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the part of the Everett persona—the persona producing a joking persona to characterize another persona. Does this make sense? I guess I am saying when the Everett persona who is already a parody persona of Everett produces a parodic commentary that simultaneously enacts the persona and exceeds it, the text doubles the persona who takes on another persona—in this case a persona who becomes a parodist, which is essentially another persona— or version thereof. The tone of parody is a persona taking on another “attitude” towards something, which it also and at the same time signals that it both means and doesn’t mean—I guess the epitome of ambivalence. Or duplicity. Or triplicity, since tone produces the persona that stands in for the imagined persona of some implied author, which then takes on a persona . . . I wonder if that could be ad infinitum? Sheesh! Too much for the day after a holiday? Kisses, Judith * * * From: W. A-L [email protected]

December 28, 2017

To: [email protected] Chère Judith, I had to think about this for a couple of days and I realized that somehow whenever one is immersed in the tone of something, one ends up imitating it. That’s probably to the benefit of the translator. I wonder if the tone translates whether I am aware of it or not— kind of unconsciously? Anyway, I have decided for now to focus on Barton’s letters and leave Percival until last. In some ways the novel poses the “Percival” character as the most perceptive, though Kincaid battles him for it. That makes me think Kincaid wrote his own, though I love the idea that they wrote one another’s. Onward and inward!! Happy New Year!!!! WALT * * *

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From: [email protected]

January 2, 2018

To: W. A-L [email protected] Hey, WALT. Cool idea!!! That thing about unconscious imitation!! Let’s call it the “tonal echo.” I looked on line to see what popular media says about what those “cognitive scientists” say about this—I wonder if this isn’t some subset of audiation—Not only do we hear, but we can reproduce. But, here is what I found: American researchers have found human brains imitate the speech patterns of other people, even complete strangers, without meaning to. They say a humans want to “bond” with others, even when a voice cannot be heard or, somewhat embarrassingly, even if another person is a foreigner. Scientists from the University of California, Riverside, found the subconscious copying of an accent comes from an inbuilt urge of the brain to “empathise and affiliate.” Their findings, reported in the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, concluded this happens when we cannot hear what is being said but are simply lip-reading. “Humans are incessant imitators,” said Prof Lawrence Rosenblum, a psychologist who led the study: “We intentionally imitate subtle aspects of each other’s mannerisms, postures and facial expressions. “We also imitate each other’s speech patterns, including inflections, talking speed and speaking time.” He added: “Sometimes we even take on the foreign accent of the person to whom we are talking, leading to embarrassing consequences.” This is from The Telegraph, August 7, 2010 in an article by Andrew Hough titled “Humans ‘sub-consciously mimic other accents’, psychologists claim,” http:​//www​.tele​graph​.co.u​k/new​s/sci​-ence​/ scie​nce-n​ews/7​93129​9/Hum​ans-s​ubcon​sciou​sly-m​imic-​other​-acce​ nts-p​sycho​logis​ts-cl​aim.h​tml. I gave you the full cite in case we need to cite it sometime and can’t find it again. But if we audiate tone in writing and then unconsciously imitate the same tone when we write about it, is that



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the same thing? Is tone the same as an “accent”? Are we trying “to empathize,” or is there something contagious about tone and its various attitudes? Sais pas . . . SWAK, Judith * * * From: W. A-L [email protected]

January 2, 2018

To: [email protected] Chère Judith, Nous savons—I think we may have discovered . . . Judith’s internet provider cut out at that point, sadly, a fairly typical occurrence.

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6 Two Tone

I mean there is nothing else for me to do as I have finished writing in my diary for today and I have decided not to read the book of Ettiquette as I glanced through it and it does not seem to have anything in it that I would care to know because it wastes quite a lot of time telling you what to call a Lord and all the Lords I have met have told me what to call them and it is generally some quite cute name like Coocooo whose real name is really Lord Cooksleigh.1

One Voice through Another But enough imitation for now. The “voices” that constitute personae derive from the tone we audiate, which is more than simple “attitude” (the term through which critics often define “tone”).2 Tone derives from the audiated imaginary of a textually generated illusion of a voice “Ettiquette” that readers attach to a persona imagined as the source of such a voice and so on, depending on which vocabulary one wants to deploy. One of the effects of close reading (really paying attention to the various ways syntax and diction produce both Sedaris’s and Everett/Kincaid’s fictional personae) is that these personae, produced as voices from audiated tone, layer visibly as personae—as poses, as dramatis personae (to return to Booth), never reducible to any equation between narrator and author. Tone represents—enacts—not only

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that slippage but also the essence of writing as performative in the Austinian sense insofar as what it makes resound in its performance is a tonal quality that germinates other assumptions.3 This has as much, if not more, to do with how we read as it does with how texts articulate. We audiate and imagine all of these layers of speakers as we read—and we may audiate several at once. We might audiate a sense that the speakers are layered, each filtering another, or that they shift and waver from mood to mood, depending on topics or circumstances. We imagine, via audiation, a sense of a text’s speaker(s) speaking that text. These speakers never resolve themselves into sources or origins at all, although we may force them into the convenient (yet still imaginary) categories of character, narrator, and author (object, speaker, and source) and further sort them into various degrees of imaginary intimacy with authors, or narrators, or circumstances. At best, these audiated speakers offer the imaginary of voices in multiple loci, each speaking through another equally imaginary consciousness. These layered voices might represent some sort of unconscious content insofar as the unconscious slips through in speech, though given the possible layering of imaginary speakers, we cannot be sure whose unconscious (if it is anyone’s) emerges. One of those speaking loci might be a notion of the “author,” whose intentions (conscious and unconscious), history, and personality make their way into the text via some sort of inevitable and irresistible inscription (ego? Words as a species of unwitting contagion, some sense that we are what we say?). Or maybe this need for a definitive source derives from the psychology of readers who must find an imagined origin for the voice they hear, attributing (because they know it is there somewhere) the voice of the text to the author, or as a “voice” of an implied author, or as the voice of the author posing as someone with a different personality, or maybe just the “author” as narrator, or the narrator as author, or the narrator as character, or a character as a character or as several characters, etc. None of these personae exist except as an effect of the text. Certainly actual human beings who write books exist, but those beings are never coterminous with what they write, the voices their texts enact, the characters, the narrators, or anything else we might ascribe to any direct, sincere, untrammeled communication. But even



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if we could “communicate,” a process upon which Derrida long ago cast doubt, a text is always a pose, one among many possible, and one that may be read and audiated differently at different times and in different contexts.4 To assume that people—authors included— mean what they say, even when producing “art,” we must dispense as well with all notions of the unconscious.5 Although often defined as “attitude,” tone is much more than that. It is a combination of style, voice, the personality it enacts, cultural contexts, literary genre, characterizations, and plot. This complex tone produces the illusion of multiple speaking consciousnesses, all deriving from the same text scrivened by one author. Tone is performance via the inscription of diction and style that enacts voices and personae.

Double Talk So Lady Shelton was really delighted to have we Americans come to her house. I mean she took Dorothy and I into the back parlor and tried to sell us some shell flowers she seems to make out of sea shells for 25 pounds. So we asked her how much it was in money and it seems it is 125 dollars. I mean I am really going to have quite a hard time in London with Dorothy because she really should not say to an English lady what she said. I mean she should not say to an English lady that in America we use shells the same way only we put a dry pea under one of them and call it a game. But I told Lady Shelton we really did not need any shell flowers. So then she took Dorothy and Major Falcon and I to her mother’s house which was just around the corner from her house. Because her mother seems to be called a Countess and raise dogs. So her mother was having a party too, and she seemed to have quite red hair and quite a lot of paint for such an elderly lady. So the first thing she asked us was she asked us if we bought some shell flowers from her daughter. So we told her no. But she did not seem to act like a Countess of her elderly age should act. Because she said, “You were right my dears—don’t let my daughter stick you—they fall apart in less than a week.” So then she asked us if we would like to buy a dog. I mean I could not stop Dorothy but she said “How long before the dogs fall apart?”6

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Anita Loos’s 1925 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes performs itself as the diary of the Arkansan Lorelei Lee, whose confidential writing style characterizes her as an undereducated and culturally naive career girl who (a) does not really know what is going on but has ideas about upper-class behavior which she tries to emulate or (b) knows quite well what is going on (i.e., rich gentlemen like her as a mistress), but writes in her diary as if she doesn’t. Her writing style enacts her pretensions toward an upper class she imagines as having a certain propriety. Her writing reflects this naive propriety, as Lorelei overcompensates, torqueing English pronouns into grotesque parodies of the awkwardness of formal English such as using the nominative “I” in place of the appropriate objective “me,” and using dependent clauses (in the previous passage beginning with “Because”) as if they were independent clauses. That Gentlemen Prefer Blondes poses as a diary, but not really— maybe poses as a fake diary insofar as it is either a diary faked by the author (who is obviously a different person) or faked by the narrator presumably writing the diary insofar as diary writers often write (despite themselves) for audiences other than themselves or even for themselves as a future audience. Diaries, hence, can already be full of posing; writing posed as diary writing is doubly posed, at a minimum. Lorelei’s naive imitation of upper-class diction produces the diary writer as someone for whom such speech is not her own discourse. Because the imitation over-corrects what the speaker seems to imagine is a species of pronominal propriety, the writing marks itself as a bad imitation, revealing instantly the speaker’s ignorance and her conceptions of upper-class speech, while simultaneously parodying both. Lorelei’s diary account, thus, offers at least four layers of personae: a Lorelei who is doing a bad imitation, those who speak the speech of those she is imitating, what we might imagine Lorelei’s speech might be if she didn’t imitate, and a parodical voice producing it all. Each layer redounds to and produces the others, mostly by implication.7 Lorelei herself notes a disparity between how she expects a “Countess” should look and behave and what she observes about the “Countess” she meets: “So her mother was having a party too, and she seemed to have quite red hair and quite a lot of paint for such an elderly lady.”8 Couching her description of the “Countess” in terms that superficially appear to present an objective observation—“she seemed to have” certain features



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one might not expect “such an elderly lady” to display—Lorelei’s description simultaneously and apparently unwittingly describes a woman who is most likely something other than a Countess. Lorelei’s slightly detached, descriptive tone derives from her use of the phrase, “seemed to have,” which offers an observation while distancing the speaker and lending an edge of uncertainty to what she describes. What Lorelei characterizes as “quite red hair and quite a lot of paint for such an elderly lady” seems both an objective observation and a comment upon the woman’s unseemly appearance. Lorelei’s repetition of the adverb, “quite” shifts from a description of the woman’s hair, estimating its extreme degree of redness, to an estimation of the copious amount of make-up the lady is wearing. That Lorelei repeats “quite,” which is a word Americans associate with upper-class British speech, and that her sentence awkwardly shifts the adverb from modifying an adjective to modifying a quantity (“a lot”) seems to temper her comments, while also exaggerating what seems to be the lady’s clown-like appearance. Lorelei’s tone enacts the duplicity that characterizes her tone throughout—her naiveté and her over-compensatory and unsophisticated attempt to perform upper-class speech layered over a different kind of attention.9 The doubled tone is not the snide sound of irony, but performs simultaneously as disbelief and critique, especially when she adds, “for such an elderly lady,” the adjective “elderly” standing less for age than social status. All of this adds up to a species of dramatic irony produced by readers’ easy penetration of Lorelei’s tonal pretensions, which themselves layer one class over another. That the iffy gentry Lorelei describes are not of the class they pretend to inhabit, and that Lorelei assumes they do (even as she unwittingly questions their self-presentation), creates a duality between pretension and appearance that sustains part of the novel’s tonal comedy. What Lorelei describes undermines her attempts to appear to be a classy lady touring Europe. She asks how much 25 pounds is “in money and it seems it is 125 dollars.” That she and Dorothy take these shell flower and dog sellers as Ladies and Countesses also seems to suggest a naiveté, although Lorelei becomes suspicious: “She did not seem to act like a Countess of her elderly age should act.” That Lorelei quotes the Lady’s speech, however, tells us even more: “You were right my dears—don’t let my daughter stick you—they fall apart in less than a week.” Despite all of Lorelei’s

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attempts to speak in a classy way, she quotes verbatim those whom she attempts to copy as much less classy than the class of individual Lorelei is trying to emulate. The “Lady” uses the same kind of slang “don’t let my daughter stick you” that Lorelei complains about Dorothy using. Lorelei seems not to know what to make of her observations, leaving them hang in her diary, subject to the framing comments she reproduces from Dorothy. But Dorothy does know the score, in yet another voice produced as a starkly different tone in Lorelei’s account. Nested among Lorelei’s attempts at proper speech are Dorothy’s comments, as drily witty as Lorelei’s descriptions are naively simplistic. Lorelei does not report Dorothy’s comments directly as she does the Countess’s. Instead she paraphrases Dorothy’s quips while appearing to rue Dorothy’s lack of class. Only once does she quote Dorothy directly: “How long before the dogs fall apart?” This line from Dorothy is actually a punch line that finishes the joke that begins (very unwittingly) as Lorelei describes the Lady’s attempt to sell sea shell flowers, an attempt Lorelei describes Dorothy as characterizing as a shell “game.” When the “Countess” reassures them that they did the right thing in refusing the Lady’s offer, and then tries to sell them dogs, Dorothy, picking up on the entire masquerade, economically compares the “Countess” to her “Lady” daughter via the potential lifespan of their objects for sale. Dorothy’s quoted line is terse and direct, linking all of the disparate elements of Lorelei’s account in a comparison that makes apparent what Lorelei describes but doesn’t seem to be able to put into a larger context. Dorothy’s tone is acerbic, certain, and a little wry, right to the point and no-nonsense. And it tends to occupy the end points and center of Lorelei’s diary discourse, even as Lorelei complains about Dorothy’s lack of class.10 As the novel enacts a diary, one writer/narrator recounts another character’s voice presumably inscribing a diary to herself in which this second voice produces yet other characters based on how the diary writer intones what these others say. The third-tier character, Dorothy, is produced by Lorelei’s diary and yet seems to preexist it insofar as Dorothy’s tone differs radically from the diary’s class pretensions. And Lorelei enacts her response retrospectively as both embarrassed and unsurprised by what Dorothy says, which adds to Dorothy’s characterization. We audiate the multiple tones of the layered accounts that enact the imaginary of the voices of these two characters from the language attributed not only to a single voice



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but also to the layering, combinations, contrasts, and responses of the voices to one another as well as with their relation to the other material the diary text presents.11 Nesting the voices that enact characters stages comparisons among tones that both enact and distinguish the tones even more, performing the synecdochal characteristics that tend to caricature each voice and its tones as playing one specific role in relation to the rest. So if Lorelei is the naive one, Dorothy becomes that much more worldly wise.

Shell Game That readers audiate Dorothy’s tone, which the narrator/voice Lorelei both presents and seems to dismiss as merely rude, produces a persistent dramatic irony produced by the circulation of voices and tones among the four layers of the text, terminating in the reader in such a way that it appears as if somehow the “author” has deployed middling layers to proffer readers an ironic take. Somehow the imaginary “author”’s tone appears winking behind the entire set-up, which, as dramatic irony always does, ends with the reader. Dorothy’s tone produces a far more perceptive, worldly wise, and savvy persona than the Lorelei persona who appears merely to recount Dorothy’s responses, though there is a second level of humor (perhaps even parody) in the ways that Lorelei situates, comments upon, and dismisses Dorothy’s observations. Readers audiate Dorothy’s tone via and in contrast to Lorelei’s tone, apperceiving Dorothy’s attitude, enacted as that much richer not only by its punch-line timing but by its contrast to Lorelei’s labored attempts at proper grammar. All of this, then, makes Lorelei appear to be even more naive in comparison to Dorothy. That Dorothy’s normalcy shocks Lorelei suggests both that Lorelei is really fooling herself about her own class aspirations and/or that she is deliberately distancing herself from what she perceives as Dorothy’s lower-class behavior so as to make herself appear to be classier. And yet always within all of this tonal layering there is the sneaking sense of another tone, the tone that would nest these tones so tellingly. The shells of the text’s layered tones—Lorelei enfolding Dorothy and her response to the tonal performances of the “Countess”— seem to reveal the cons at the heart of these London visits. Not only

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Dorothy’s tone, audiated from her manner of speech—“How long before the dogs fall apart?”—but the repetition of circumstances already signal the dubiety of both the manners and the pedigree of the ostensible London nobility they are visiting. Selling shell flowers and dogs to unwitting visitors is just as much of a con as a shell game, a con exposed by Dorothy’s final question. The clever nesting of voices, however, inevitably points to the absent (hidden? enshelled?) arranger, the operator of the game of tones, the shell game of the text itself that aims less to fool than to reveal the hoaxic structure enacted by the layered tones. These tones, audiated and produced via other tones enacting one character as perceived by another character, set up a shell game of distraction and surprise that amplifies both the clash of tonal personae, and the sense of a third, unrepresented tone lurking within—like the hidden pea. A shell game consists of the manipulation of three shells under one of which a single pea hides. The shell game operator moves the shells around quickly, in circular patterns, inviting observers to keep track of the shell hiding the pea—and to make bets that they can identify the shell hiding the pea. The operator talks to the observers, distracting them with jokes, comments, extra hand movements, misdirection, etc. Before the betting begins, the operator will also let observers correctly identify the proper shell several times in a row, so as to build their confidence. But when the bets begin—and though the operator appears to be doing the same things with the shells—the shell action and its accompanying discourse engage more distractions (partly possible because the observers are now inured to the game) and when observers bet, they can no longer identify the correct shell. There is a pea somewhere, and they know it is there as the operator reveals it after observers guess the incorrect shell: but, it is never where it seems to be. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ layered personae enact a similar shell game, except that there is no consciousness, at least at first, that there are either shells or a hidden pea. The joke of the text seems to be Lorelei’s clumsily pretentious misapprehension of the world around her. As she introduces Dorothy, the text seems to offer a corrective voice that confirms what readers already surmise. If Lorelei’s grammatical misdirections obscure, we can find the pea, which is not Dorothy, but Lorelei’s rewarded extramarital circumstances. When Lorelei’s accounts add a third



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layer of speaking characters—the Countess, for example, or her daughter, the “Lady”—upon whom first Lorelei and then Lorelei’s recounting of Dorothy’s quips comment, the text puts three shells or layers in motion, each one referring to the other. Where is the pea? Is there one? If this is an extended analogy, what does the pea stand for? In the case of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the pea is the shell game operator, the tone behind the tone behind the tones. The pea is not under a shell, but again, as the narrator of The Heart of Darkness suggests, it surrounds it as an aura, as the feeling of a presence enfolding the antic politics of the text’s tonal layers. The pea is the shell. So Lorelei’s book of “Ettiquette” has nothing she “would care to know,” especially as the character repeatedly takes things at literal face value. Lorelei is herself a face: the face of the text, the surface plumbed by what she seems innocently to quote of what clearly more savvy others say. On the one side is the sidekick, Dorothy, who not only knows but constantly comments upon the score. On the other, the “gentlemen” who “score” Lorelei, squiring her around, pretending to educate her, deploying her as an accessory to enhance their aging versions of masculinity Viagra’ed by wealth. Their tones, in contrast to Dorothy, are the tones of con men, trying to fool a girl into doing things she shouldn’t ought to do.

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7 Two Tones

So far, this exploration of tone has engaged with comic texts (with the exception of Chapter 2, unless we want to regard literary criticism as somehow funny in se). Whatever type of narrator comic texts produce (first-person, third-person omniscient, etc.), the text’s tones enact and layer personae, evincing more than one voice, or one voice with multiple moods and/or agendas, stacking several different tones simultaneously. The imaginary narrator that emerges as the implied “origin” (or origins) of a text seems both to embody and to manage this array of voices with multiple tones, complex and often self-contradictory attitudes, and implications about both what the text signifies and how it does so. The narrator of a comic text is often aggressively “present,” collecting and reflecting these attitudes—irony, sarcasm, auxesis, hyperbole. The implied commentary on characters and events these tones offer is a part of a comic event in which multiple, layered tones develop, play along, roll, gather, and continue to roll into an accruing moment, where one comment (such as Dorothy’s line about the dogs falling apart, Sedaris’s sudden information about the rights of blind hunters) pulls it all momentarily together into a coherent focus that offers insight, relief, payoff. The layerings of tone are intrinsic to this comic mechanism, sounding alternatives that shift quickly from one to another, sometimes resounding and reverberating, shepherding the material that gathers, precipitates, pays off. Multiple, sometimes clashing, sometimes harmonizing, tones constitute part of the performance of moods, positions, and attitudes that collect, collapse, and signal comedy.1 But does this layering of tone accompany and produce only comic staging, or do tones layer as well in serious or even tragic texts?

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Could we just as easily read more “serious” narration comically or perhaps see different shades of despair in tragedy? What are the tonal cues of the serious, a far more difficult attitude to discern in relation to the narrated, because unlike the comic, “serious” narration appears to privilege the told over any sense of a teller’s attitude (including first-person narrated tales about the narrator/ character’s misfortunes)? Insofar as the imaginary of a teller derives from the told, even in comedy we initially take the “told” seriously. But something about the tone in comic narration signals a trick that instigates retrospection, a recalibration and re-audiation. Does the “serious,” too, evince an attitude beyond what appears to be “factual,” “experiential,” or “authentic” reportage? Perhaps “serious” narrators also force a retrospective re-audiation. At some point we realize what we thought had been sincere or objective might not have been so at all. Even critical discourse (as in Chapter 2) has a tone that evinces some attitude or position in relation to the texts it examines, serious as it is. As we saw, it ended up unwittingly imitating the tone of the comic text it was analyzing. Are these phenomena instances of the author (real or implied) somehow piercing through all of the impossibilities of signification, unable to conceal an opinion? If that is the case in comic texts, would more serious or tragic texts forgo the layered tones necessary to satire and irony, audiating somehow as more sincere, direct, singular? What textual practices enable the audiation of seriousness, earnestness? We know tone can backfire. What may seem serious to some may be ironic to others. What textual practices make a difference in tone?

Face-Off Here are two descriptions of country women, the first from Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm (1932) and the second from D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox (1922). The character from Gibbons’s text is elderly; the woman from The Fox is just past the first bloom of youth. From Cold Comfort Farm: She put out her hand, but it was not taken at once. The lantern was lifted higher while Judith steadily looked into her face, in silence. The seconds passed. Flora wondered if her lipstick were



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the wrong shade. It then occurred to her that there was a less frivolous cause for the silence which had fallen, and for the steady regard with which her cousin confronted her. So, Flora mused, must Columbus have felt when the poor Indian fixed his solemn, unwavering gaze upon the great sailor’s face. For the first time a Starkadder looked upon a civilized being.2 From The Fox: March did most of the out door work. When she was out and about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and her loose cap, she looked almost like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident, even tinged with a little indifference or irony. But her face was not a man’s face, ever. The wisps of her crisp dark hair blew about her as she stooped, her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once. Her mouth, too, was almost pinched as if in pain and irony. There was something odd and unexplained about her. She would stand balanced on one hip, looking at the fowls pattering about in the obnoxious fine mud of the sloping yard, and calling to her favourite white hen, which came in answer to her name. But there was an almost satirical flicker in March’s big, dark eyes as she looked at her three-toed flock pottering about under her gaze, and the same slight dangerous satire in her voice as she spoke to the favored Patty, who pecked at March’s boot by way of friendly demonstration.3 Let’s compare these passages not because they have anything more in common than a description of a rural denizen, but mostly because they don’t, at least not in terms of tone and style.4 The passage from Cold Comfort Farm enacts an omniscient thirdperson narrator, recounting events in this instance from the point of view of the character, Flora, though this narratorial construction shifts from omniscience to different characterological points of view throughout the rest of the text. The paragraph from The Fox is narrated by a third-person omniscient narrator, which also shifts from omniscience to various points of view throughout the novella. Despite these narratorial similarities, what do the disparate tones of these passages tell us not only about the texts but also about their

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narratorial imaginary, which in both cases offers specific attitudes toward characters, situations, and larger social formations? Cold Comfort Farm announces itself as parody from the first paragraph of its tongue-in-cheek “Foreword” addressed to “Anthony Pookworthy, Esq., A.B.S., L.L.R.” (The “A.B.S.” refers to an undergraduate college degree, the “L.L.R.” most likely to Lloyd’s Law Reports, as British law degrees are typically LLB, but who knows? The “Pookworthy” says it all.) “It is with something more than the natural deference of a tyro at the loveliest, most arduous and perverse of the arts in the presence of a master-craftsman that I lay this book before you”5. Although the “Foreword” parodies the genre of literary forewords dedicated to admired figures and cultural inspirations, in what ways does the rest of the text signal that it, too, is a parody? And of what, exactly? Novels about rural culture in England? Rural culture in England? Both? If so, then it is both parody and satire, if not outright burlesque. But before we get to any consideration of tone and parody, let us take this passage at its apparent face value. The paragraph cited earlier describes the first meeting of impoverished gentlewomen, Flora, whose financial straits lead her to rediscover her family’s rural roots at their somewhat isolated and bizarrely idiosyncratic farm in Sussex. After withstanding the complications of actually getting from the small-town train station to the farm, Flora encounters the lead figure of the farm’s inept management, Judith, who, it turns out, is only the face that fronts the face of the real, hidden boss, Aunt Ada Doom, who never emerges from her bedroom. In the first sentence, above, Flora is active—she “put out her hand”—but the verbs of the passage turn from active to passive, enacting the character of familial nonresponse: “Her hand was not taken,” and “the lamp was lifted higher.” The tone is matter-of-fact; the gestures signify rejection. The action is stalled. It restarts again on the part of the country relative. “Judith steadily looked into her face, in silence.” Separated by a comma, the prepositional phrase “in silence” synaesthetically extends the looking, which as a “steady,” continuous, and vaguely perpetuated action, suggests a lack of breeding, a power move designed to discomfit the newcomer, or some embarrassment on the part of the looker: “Seconds passed.” The passage pauses by describing a pause; its active verbs define inactivity. The relative continues her non-responsive behavior, inciting Flora to break the tonal stalemate by shifting uncomfortably



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to thoughts of improper cosmetics: “Flora wondered if her lipstick were the wrong shade.” Catching up with the situation, Flora realizes that something more profound is occurring—something “less frivolous” than her lipstick hue, as her cousin continues her silent “steady regard.” Flora’s unvoiced thought about her lipstick, emerging in the middle of this extended taciturn perusal, not only enacts the feeling of Flora’s own anxiety but produces an anxious tone as a part of the comparison of moods the passage sets up in its description of this initial confrontation. This is itself a clash of tones—the tone of Flora with her lipstick and urbanity with the tone of an actively prolonged, silent, confident, and perhaps antisocial observation. Suspended in this face-off, the passage continues with Flora’s perception of herself as “Columbus” “when the poor Indian fixed his solemn, unwavering gaze upon the great sailor’s face.” As akin to a continental explorer, Flora envisions herself—she “muses”— as the representative of civilization that has encountered more primitive inhabitants: “For the first time a Starkadder looked upon a civilized being.” City/country becomes an epic encounter, with Flora (who has just signaled her own superficiality) casting herself as a civilized Columbus in contrast to the apparently dumbfounded Judith, who can only stare at her. But because the passage is from the point of view of Flora, Judith’s behavior is still a mystery, the passages’ description of Flora’s perception of the meeting telling us more about Flora than her country kin. The relative’s nonresponse, it turns out in retrospect, is less a nonresponse than an unexpected response in the form of an extended scrutiny, or at least that is what Flora finally concludes. Given the grim ambiance of the farm and the rough appearance of her relatives, Flora’s insecurity enacts the rift between the superficial urbanite and her humorless rural kin. The intervening lipstick line suddenly reverses the valance of the two positions. Perhaps Judith is trying to figure out just exactly what Flora is. The protracted silence from her relative, prolonged by the description itself as well as by Flora’s discomfited tone, leaves this other side blank—without personality, engagement, or apparent apprehension, except precisely as a blank. The Cold Comfort Farm family is toneless. It could be that Judith is simply cautious. Then there is the surname “Starkadder.” Flora’s characterization of the Starkadders as uncivilized in confrontation with herself as a “civilized being” layers several tones.

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Beginning with an apparently mundane description of a meeting, the tone of the passage becomes anxious in its delay, slightly sardonic in Flora’s worry about her lipstick, then finally dismissive as Flora reasserts her misguided “superiority” by evoking the scene of a colonial encounter. But this tonal layering simultaneously enacts a multidirectional satire. On one side is Flora whose notion of civilization in this passage seems to consist of a concern with her appearance and a faltering/regained sense of her own superiority. The “civilized” are frivolous and self-conscious. On the other side is the hold-out mystery of the relative, who, for a moment, gains the upper hand with her discomfiting silence and who has the surname “Starkadder,” a combination of bareness and deadly reptile. Add the surname to “Judith,” the apocryphal character who beheaded Holofernes, and this stand-in matriarch is potentially lethal. The tonal shifts of the passage enact the reversal of an expected power relation in which the city cousin, deigning to visit the hinterlands, finds herself temporarily disarmed by the stubborn taciturnity of the country. As Flora regains her confidence, the tone shifts from a version of slightly detached objectivity to the double-edged satire of characterizations and missed communication tinged by a misapplied comparison between them as a colonial encounter, which itself offers a satirical take on the ways in which colonizers view themselves. And, we still know very little about Judith. D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox portrays two small-town women who decide to operate a farm during the First World War. The women comprise what appears to be something of a couple, one, Banford, feminine, and the other, March, hardier and more physically active. The description of March begins as a matter-of-fact description. She “did most of the out door work.” But the next sentence introduces a shade of some tone. She is “out and about, in her puttees and breeches, her belted coat and loose cap”—male attire, but refashioned in the dual pairings of the description, both preceded by the possessive “her,” as something almost quaint, aspiring imitations. “Puttees and breeches” sounds almost like someone playing dress-up when preceded by the possessive, the girl donning the clothes of a grown up. But “she looked,” the sentence continues, “like some graceful, loose-balanced young man, for her shoulders were straight, and her movements easy and confident, even tinged with a little indifference or irony.” March can wear the working garb because she carries herself like a “graceful, loose-balanced young man.” Part feminine



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(“graceful”), but physically fit (“loose-balanced”), March can carry off her work clothes not only because she has the physique but mostly because she has the manner. The manner, however, is not masculinity itself but an attitude toward her own wearing of male attire with “a little indifference or irony.” This “irony,” however, also characterizes a part of the feel of the passage’s tone. Ironically, March can wear men’s work clothes, and even wear them without looking too out of place. But the bigger irony is that “her face was not a man’s face, ever.” Insisting on the femininity of March’s face, the passage continues its description of a face that in itself also defines March’s personality: “Her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once.” Like her clothing March wears one appearance on top of another; her eyes have a “big, wide, dark” innocence. The eyes are “shy and sardonic at once.” Just as March is the woman in the man’s clothes who can pull off the transformation because she is like a “graceful, loose-balanced young man,” her face is both innocent and aware of the contradictions in her appearance and bearing. “Her mouth, too, was almost pinched as if in pain and irony.” March’s “irony” exists not in the contradiction between her garb and her sex, but in the description itself which suggests that even though March is female, she can still pull off being selfcontained and in control. The ironic tone of this description also enacts an incredulity about the easy slippage of sexual politics. Ironically, March, a female, makes a passable male. It will only take a more male male to come along and put her in her place as a female, helpless against male mystique. And now I am being ironic. Or sardonic. It is as if the description needs a dose of irony to be serious, suggesting in the end that there is nothing more foolish than two women trying to make a go of it on a farm. There was, as the passage concludes, “an almost satirical flicker in March’s big dark eyes” as she looks at the chickens she is tending. But in a sense here, the tone suggests that just as March is out of place wearing men’s clothes and tending chickens, so the entire narrative, too, is out of place describing their existence. The novella becomes even more sardonic as it narrates the impulsive courtship between a young soldier and March, as it, too, is a mismatch enabled by some undergirding notion of essential sexual mystery that calls the reluctant March forth from her masculine role to turn her into an empty shell.

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That the passage displaces its irony onto the description of the character itself embodies the tonal displacements of the description. If it is ironic that March can function successfully as a farm laborer, if it is ironic that she presents the physical attributes of a looselimbed youth even though she is female, it is also ironic that the young soldier would be attracted to her (him?) and that she would relinquish her independence as easily as she does. Just as March pets her favorite chicken, “Patty,” so March becomes the young soldier’s favorite chick, helpless in the face of nature’s inequities.6 But, as the description suggests, these ironies are tonally reversed, dislocated onto March herself. The narrative describes March as “sardonic” and “ironic.” About what? Her own position as the contributor of farm labor to a joint venture? Her relation to the feminine and controlling Banford? The war’s thrusting such a position upon her? In depicting March herself as ironic and sardonic, the text, thus, displaces and hence seems to evade producing those tones in its portrait of her. Seemingly once removed, however, only makes the tone more sardonic in its simultaneous attempt to seem detached while offering conclusions about the character’s attitude. If March is ironic and sardonic, then in describing her as such, the tone of the text derives its tone from its own observations about character, which in the end, come from the narrator’s tone and not the character herself.

Face Off—Face Off To-night, while Sarah clattered at the sideboard, Mrs. Darke sat staring at the tablecloth, drumming on it with her long, restless fingers. She was just beyond the circle of lamplight, and the dimness made her seem even taller than she was. Her thin lips, very pale and straight, were closed with almost painful firmness. Her forehead was covered with lines, both vertical and horizontal, and an expression of frigidity combined with exasperation made her face sinister.7 Judith Starkadder made an impatient movement. Her large hands had a quality which made them seem to sketch vast horizons with their slightest gesture. She looked a woman without boundaries as she stood wrapped in a crimson shawl to protect her bitter,



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magnificent shoulders from the splintery cold of the early air. She seemed fitted for any stage, however enormous.8 Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm enacts additional complications to The Fox’s ouroboric tonal displacements. Its reversal of the expected valences of city/country parallel the valences of parody in which one text imitates and makes fun of the earnest attributes of another. We audiate the tone of parody as the tongue-in-cheek, as the sense that the serious is not serious but merely poised as serious. This is a species of perspective on another genre that does not manifest itself as detachment but precisely as perspective, making itself visible (audiatable?) through hyperbole, auxesis, visible imitation. Cold Comfort Farm’s descriptions do not parody Lawrence’s renditions of rural folk, though in a sense they do deploy a similar matter-of-fact tone (minus the adjectival estimations of character). Instead, the novel parodies the early twentieth-century genre of romantic literary accounts of rural life by such authors as Mary Gladys Meredith Webb and Sheila Kaye-Smith. These novels were often melodramatic, full of doom, gloom, and idiosyncratic characters.9 The passages cited earlier offer two examples of descriptions, Cold Comfort Farm’s description of Judith Starkadder and The House in Dormer Forest’s Mrs. Darke (the daughter who, like Judith Starkadder, fronts an even more fearsome mother). Insofar as parody is a tonal expansion upon some referent text or genre, then these two descriptions of rural matriarchs play out the ways parody deploys multiple tonal layers to refer to, enact, and comment upon a genre and style of writing as well as upon a stereotypical powerful, heartless matriarch of rural fiction. As awkwardly self-contained as the encounter between Flora and Judith in Cold Comfort Farm, the tone of The House in Dormer Forest’s description of Mrs. Darke is tonally distanced and detached, presenting an apparently objective portrait of a woman in shadows—“just beyond the circle of lamplight.” The passage uses the boundary of the light to account for Mrs. Darke’s seeming aggrandizement, while it deploys detailed physical description—“thin lips, pale and straight” “closed with almost painful firmness”—and the lines of her forehead, “both vertical and horizontal, and an expression of frigidity combined with exasperation” to make “her face sinister.” The details themselves

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enact a tonal containment, or the sense of a tone constrained to factuality, even as Mrs. Darke’s “long, restless fingers” drum on “the tablecloth.” That the portrait is an apparently constrained characterization of a frustrated containment produces a tone of impatience, again constrained by the tonal patience of careful facts, a layering that itself enacts the persona of Mrs. Darke. There is unknown drama here, something hidden, just out of the light and imprisoned by the lines of her face, ultimately signified by her name. But where in Mrs. Darke’s description one tone (the reportage of observed detail) contains another (the exasperation and controlled frustration of the finger-drumming character) that muffles the passage’s tones by pushing it all to an imaginary and hidden inside, Cold Comfort Farm’s staged scene of encounter channels Judith Starkadder’s potentially sinister qualities outwardly. Webb’s novel focuses on the rural denizens as character types typical of the harsh conditions and poverty of rural existence. Gibbons’s parody of the genre poses the hypothesis of the rural characters’ encounter with the worldly and trivial, which, in its species of tonal recursion parodies the melodramatic style of such rural novels, while satirizing the smug conceit of the city visitors. Gibbon’s parody is less an exaggerated imitation of style than it is a recasting of situation, taking the melodrama at face value and then proposing circumstances that depend upon the bizarre idiosyncrasies of country dwellers. This recasting picks up Webb’s description of the sinister and frustrated Mrs. Darke without seeming to do so by tonally entrapping her emotions within the facticity of an imprisoning body that signals its discomfiture by means of its fingers. Cold Comfort Farm shifts the tone (or the shifts in tone actually enact its recasting), from entrapment to the magnificent boundarylessness of Judith Starkadder. Turning from the contained to the expansive, Cold Comfort Farm’s description of Judith Starkadder also focuses on the character’s hands, but in this case “they sketch vast horizons with their slightest gesture.” Although she is “wrapped in a crimson shawl,” the garment protects “her bitter, magnificent shoulders from the splintery cold of the early air.” Unlike Mrs. Darke, who hovers outside of the lamp’s cast light, Judith Starkadder is larger than life: “She seemed fitted for any stage, however enormous.” Although the description’s tone of grandiosity is tempered by such adjectives as “bitter” and “splintery cold,” and though, like Mrs. Darke,



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Judith Starkadder is “impatient,” the tone of Cold Comfort Farm’s description is expansive, almost admiring of a character with the power to regard her city cousin as an interrupting oddity. The distance produced by Cold Comfort Farm’s subtle tonal hyperbole does not produce parody by layering a perception of a genre on top of an imitation, but instead suggests that parody is a revelation, a turning inside out. Where Mrs. Darke is curled and trapped, Judith Starkadder is magnificent and “larger than life.” Where Mrs. Darke is sinister, crabbed in the gloom beyond the lamp, Judith Starkadder stares down her visitor, turning the stereotypical dynamics of the urban and the rural upside-down. The two characters, Mrs. Darke and Judith Starkadder, occupy similar roles in rural households as the daughters who command on behalf of their disabled or sequestered mothers, overseeing a rough familial rabble of eccentrics and oddballs. But while Mrs. Darke’s aegis is sinister, Judith Starkadder’s is powerful, if “impatient,” while the substitute matriarch commands the farm. Both Cold Comfort Farm and The House in Dormer Forest depict these rural scenarios as matriarchal, contravening D. H. Lawrence’s vision of the rural as a realm naturally dominated by alpha males. This finally suggests the irony of an irony: if March and Banford are two women who go it alone—and for a while happily—and if some depictions of rural life render the familial structure matriarchal, why does The Fox’s depiction of March displace the apparent irony of sexual reversals onto the character of March as her irony instead of as the irony of a more general rural disorder of the illusions of patriarchy? Or, is The Fox enacting the irony that the young soldier who thinks, like the fox, that he must possess is in fact fooling himself about the order of things? What happens when the reversals of irony turn out to be the case after all? What produces the tones we audiate as parody and irony? Or are these attitudes evoked by tones evinced by a combination of diction, syntax, and some reference beyond the text itself?

The “Wisps of Her Crisp, Dark Hair” Parody makes fun of a genre or form by recalling its features, then shifting those attributes slightly so that genre qua genre becomes visible as such with its characteristic gestures as well as what

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becomes, in contrast, its relative absurdities. Offering dysfunctional cause/effect relations, deploying adjectives that are, in context, hyperbolic or too plentiful, playing up stereotypes by making them even more stereotypical, parody is the effect of a textual excess audiated as a mismatch, as an infelicitous stylistic offering producing a tone that signals a voice conscious of itself as a voice deliberately misnarrating. Linda Hutchison identifies this practice as “self-conscious, self-contradictory, self-undermining statement.”10 The tone of parody signals a consciousness of the text being other than the serious matter-of-fact material it seems to present at first glance. The vague discordance of the first reading impels an instant recursive recognition whose second tone layers the first, speaking as if with its fingers crossed behind its back and ending its discourse with a wink. Parody’s double consciousness is finally less temporal than choral, its discordance resolved via a consciousness of the text’s meta-commentary. Parody is the tonality of tongue-in-cheekness, which enacts a literal duplicity—a two-tonguedness. In the earlier passages from Cold Comfort Farm, this tongue-incheek tone is most evident in the passage where Flora first encounters Judith Starkadder in the odd evocation of natives encountering Columbus. The out-of-scale, impulsive reach from a Sussex farm to the imaginary of a New World colonial history not only suddenly shifts from the mundane to the wildly out-of-proportion but also forces a retrospective re-audiation of the preceding lines, picking up the silliness of Flora’s worry about her lipstick hue, and recasting all as offering disproportionate responses out-of-sync with the apparent situation. Cold Comfort Farm revels in parody, offering various modes of self-conscious self-commentary on the characterizations, grimly dark settings, absurdly melodramatic situations, and prose style of rural melodramas, including those of D. H. Lawrence, whose rural revelations, though rendered in a less soap operatic style, still often present the agrarian as a bit contrarian. In the description of March, supra, The Fox labors to project what the text refers to as “irony” onto the character’s facial expression, and gives March’s eyes a “satirical flicker.” Her “look” is layered, “The wisps of her crisp dark hair blew about her as she stooped, her eyes were big and wide and dark, when she looked up again, strange, startled, shy and sardonic at once.” Just like the passage’s tone. The phrase, “Wisps of crisp dark hair,” evinces a poetic fragility and femininity in its



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sibilant consonance. But even this synecdochal evocation of delicate beauty is a bit too much, its rhyming “sps” difficult to pronounce without inadvertently making fun of the phrase. The passage describes March as ironic, satirical, and sardonic, but is describing a character with such tropic generalizations the same as deploying an ironic (or satirical or sardonic) tone in doing so? The sentence in the previous paragraph (“the wisps . . .”) itself layers tone upon tone, offering a gentle, romanticized portrait of frail detail, then characterizing March’s overall expression as having the self-conscious and even critical apprehensions of a person at odds with herself. And if March is self-ironic, or satirical, or sardonic, then what does that look like? What does it mean that the passage transposes tone (and all three of these tropes have a large tonal component) into appearance, and especially the look of March’s looks? The passage suggests that March is aware that she presents an appearance that contradicts itself, except, as the passage is also quick to point out, it doesn’t. Maybe that is the irony March’s eyes express. But why might the character apperceive the lack of discordance as irony or even be sardonic about that if she is relatively content in her role? Does she become any happier or more herself when she relinquishes her puttees and becomes the romantic object of the young soldier, or that the final irony is that in complying with the selfish whims of the soldier, she loses herself? The text anticipates that March’s unsettled demeanor somehow anticipates her ironic fate, unless we see her “fulfillment” as a woman as some sort of ironic undoing of irony in a vicious satire of what wartime does to sexual relations within the sardonic consciousness of a character well aware that she can belong nowhere without losing herself. Or, The Fox’s displacement of tonal rhetorical devices onto the facial expressions of one of its main characters might also offer a contained and coded commentary on the parody of rural literature The Fox endeavors not to be. The displacement of descriptions of attitude ironically defends against the text’s own engagement with a genre of literature generally understood to be romantic and melodramatic. The romance of the young soldier and March is hardly romantic in The Fox, brokered as it is by the little phallic fox and enabled by the soldier’s murder of March’s companion. As in many of Lawrence’s descriptions of compulsive mating, a force beyond the individual—a life force stronger and more basic than

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whim or romance—drives male and female together.11 But a text describing a character as having an ironic facial expression and a text that enacts an ironic tone are two different things. If the text were ironic about March, it would seem to be passing a judgment on her masculine passing. But as it displaces that irony onto March, it locates itself as commenting on the harsh necessities of war. But doesn’t some of the depicted irony bleed back into the tone? What would constitute an ironic tone? Insofar as irony is knowing that one is saying the opposite of what one means, this suggests that readers audiate the difference between the two in apprehending the passage itself. The only way of knowing that one is saying the opposite of what one means is tone—a tone that signals a lack of sincerity, slight exaggeration, mockery, vague disapproval—unless what one says is so absurd as to transform an ironic tone to the sardonic (irony + bitterness), also a tone apprehended through audiation (dismissive mockery). But when a text describes a facial expression as ironic, does the description itself share tonally in the irony it describes? Can a text be ironic about irony? In The Fox, the irony of the passage is a bit contagious insofar as the text’s repetition of the terms “irony” and “satire” suggests that perhaps this apprehension is less March’s than that of the narrator. But the narrator’s defensive preemption of tonal irony by naming irony as such suggests that the passage defends against another kind of irony: that somehow this rural tale ironically repeats a narrative akin to the melodramatic agrarian narrative it endeavors to avoid, precisely by signaling that not even the characters take their situation seriously. In addition, the irony the text attributes to March distinguishes her from her partner, the far more traditional Banford, whom the narrative kills off so as to benefit the young virile, dispossessed male and enable the fulfillment of the primal animal magnetism embodied by the fox. The irony is that March, finally, was most likely happier when she was being ironic and sardonic than she was at the end of the tale when she had become estranged from her own potential. The tone at the end of The Fox suggests that this is the case. Instead of describing a character as sardonic, the tone itself becomes sardonic, depressed, unsure: And then he would have her, and he would have his own life at last. He chafed, feeling he hadn’t got his own life. He would



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never have it till she yielded and slept in him. Then he would have all his own life as a young man and a male, and she would have all her own life as a woman and a female. There would be no more of this awful straining. She would not be a man any more, an independent woman with a man’s responsibility. Nay, even the responsibility for her own soul she would have to commit to him. He knew it was so, and obstinately held out against her, waiting for the surrender. “You’ll feel better when once we get over the seas to Canada over there,” he said to her as they sat among the rocks on the cliff. She looked away to the sea’s horizon, as if it were not real. Then she looked round at him, with the strained, strange look of a child that is struggling against sleep. “Shall I?” she said. “Yes,” he answered quietly. And her eyelids dropped with the slow motion, sleep weighing them unconscious. But she pulled them open again to say: “Yes, I may. I can’t tell. I can’t tell what it will be like over there.” “If only we could go soon!” he said, with pain in his voice.12 There is irony here, the irony that the young man is the one who is incomplete without the woman, not the other way around. He has destroyed March by destroying Banford and by convincing March that his needs constituted the authenticity of a nature beyond consciousness. What is March’s tone of voice when she questions Henry’s reassurance that she’ll “feel better once we get over the seas to Canada,” by asking, “Shall I?” She has “the strained, strange look of a child that is struggling against sleep.” Weariness maybe, or an inability to resist further the young man’s desperate importuning, and even his murdering her companion. He has stolen her as a fox steals a chicken, and ironically, perhaps sardonically, she doesn’t know if she will ever feel right again. Ironically, March never really gives in. She puts off. The possible irony of tone reflects the irony of the story, its failures of satisfaction, the penalties of not knowing whom one loves or who one is or complying with the self-interest of others.

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8 Atonement The Sound a Tree Makes When It Falls

We shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect, but we shall voice our assent in different tones, and it is on the precise tone of voice we employ now that our subsequent conclusions will depend.1 Comedy is tonally enacted, but tragedy is told. Tragedy’s tones are enacted as well, but they tend to resonate versions of sincerity and conveyance, drawing little attention to a narrator’s enacted personality. The tones of comic texts make themselves audible, jostle and layer, collide and circle, push back and forth, and encourage retrospection. But what tones both produce and derive from tragic, serious tellings—narratives with ups and downs, complex circumstances, failures, death? Discerning tone is not simply a matter of the direction of events in a plot or the derailment of expectations. The tones of texts themselves are part of what signals the tenor of a text, so that a large part of how we know whether a text is comic, tragic, both, or detached and matter-of-fact is by apprehending the voice and tone enacted by the telling. Even then, some texts defy expectations about genre. Some describe tragic events in ways that produce discordant tones that themselves enact

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unexpected relations to events, characters, and narrative voice(s). Some perhaps, narrate tragic events in a tragic tone. But what are the tones of the tragic? The following passage from D. H. Lawrence’s The Fox depicts the tragic scene of an accidental death by falling tree. The account of the accident, however, is not focused on the dying character, but on the responses of those around her. Perhaps this is where tragedy resides—not in the victim but in the survivors. Maybe death itself is not as in se tragic as we might expect: There was a moment of pure, motionless suspense, when the world seemed to stand still. Then suddenly his form seemed to flash up enormously tall and fearful, he gave two swift, flashing blows, in immediate succession, the tree was severed, turning slowly, spinning strangely in the air and coming down like a sudden darkness on the earth. No one saw what was happening except himself. No one heard the strange little cry which the Banford gave as the dark end of the bough swooped down, down on her. No one saw her crouch a little and receive the blow on the back of the neck. No one saw her flung outwards and laid, a little twitching heap, at the foot of the fence. No one except the boy. And he watched with intense bright eyes, as he would watch a wild goose he had shot. Was it winged or dead? Dead! Immediately he gave a loud cry. Immediately March gave a wild shriek that went far, far down the afternoon. And the father started a strange bellowing sound. The boy leapt the fence and ran to the fringe. The back of the neck and head was a mass of blood, of horror. He turned it over. The body was quivering with little convulsions. But she was dead really. He knew it, that it was so. He knew it in his soul and his blood. The inner necessity of his life was fulfilling itself, it was he who was to live. The thorn was drawn out of his bowels. So he put her down gently. She was dead.2 Standing still, pausing, as happens at the beginning of this passage and as was enacted in Cold Comfort Farm’s initial encounter between Flora and Judith Starkadder, seems to warn of grim and tragic events to follow. The narration pauses to narrate a pause; voice gives way to something akin to stage directions. All stops, “pure, motionless,”

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riveted by “suspense” in both senses of the word: suspended motion and tense expectation. In the next sentence, all happens quickly, the verb clauses barely pause for commas. The young soldier, Henry’s “form seemed to flash up”; he “gave two swift, flashing blows.” The sentence, like the action it depicts, enacts a quick succession of movements: flashing, rising, hitting. The second half of the sentence, however, winds down, slows, delays the final, perhaps expected, result through the slowed rhythm of words and phrases. After Henry’s rapid movement, all in “immediate succession,” and in active voice, the passage’s verbs become passive, that is, “the tree was severed.” Then the verbs shift again from passive to a series of present participles: “turning,” “spinning,” and “coming down.” The initial event, described in the first two sentences, ends suddenly with the evocation of a “sudden darkness,” planetary in its scope, after dallying with moments of continuous action. This opening portion of the rendition of Banford’s death begins and ends with pauses, suspensions that in the end come to death. The tone of these initial sentences derives from the shifts in defined motion, both the motion the passage describes and the relative speeds of the descriptions themselves as they pause then hurry then participially linger as the actions accumulate and layer toward a climax which returns to the pause, but now without “suspense.” The tone of expectation produced by the first sentence’s setting of “pure, motionless suspense,” which, in ending with “the world seeming to stand still,” already shifts from what appears to be a detached description (“there was”) to a more subjective perception “seemed to stand still.” The concluding appeal to perception retroactively reverberates to the sentence’s opening “motionless suspense,” producing a second or layering tone of a generalized tense anticipation involving all of the characters (as well as the text’s readers) who witness this catastrophe. The tone of the first sentence produces this suspense, especially as the description continues it by not offering any resolution but instead extending the sense of anticipation to a second sentence. This anticipation seems to be fulfilled by the sudden, swift actions of the next sentence that circle and wheel literally like the falling tree from a rise to a fall, from heightened anticipation to its feared result, though we still do not know what that result is. No one anticipated this result except the passage’s primary actor, Henry. The invisibility of this tragedy to all but the chief actor and the

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passage’s narrator extends the anticipation of the witnesses, while simultaneously appearing to relieve that of the readers. We know and we don’t know. Some know and others don’t. Describing what is not visible to the passage’s witnesses, the tone becomes detached, almost neutral. The next five sentences, all of which begin with the phrase “No one . . .” protract this tension-producing suspension (suspended both by the depicted scene and the shift in verb), which is nonetheless already relieved by the hint that the actor himself sees and knows. The repetition of “no one” produces almost a ritual tone, a verbal knell marking a passing as yet unannounced. The resolution holds off, but splits: one part knowing that Henry knows; the other part still anticipating. Shifting, then, from no one seeing to no one hearing, the account offers the first clue about the outcome in “the strange little cry which the Banford gave as the dark end of the bough swooped down, down on her.” The final scene, held off, becomes redundant. The “dark end of the bough swooped” like a bird, “down, down on her.” The repetition continues the delay; the anticipation, prolongs the moment. But still, “no one saw,” still the anticipated end exists in two states simultaneously: we know and the passage’s witnesses (except Henry) don’t know. The passage links us to Henry. Despite the passage’s third-person pronouns, despite its seemingly detached description, we share the point of view of the tree-feller. We see what he sees. “No one saw her flung outwards and laid, a little twitching heap, at the foot of the fence.” More delay, more anticipation, more tense expectation for the passage’s witnesses. Continued gathering and elaboration of the effects of the felled tree on the body for the readers aligned with Henry’s perspective, which is itself strangely detached and matter-of-fact, “the” Banford’s body like an inanimate object or an animal, some prey to be dispatched, “a little twitching heap,” dehumanized. The passage is still suspended. The death itself is less than what is still anticipated in the witnesses’ reactions to it. But the passage openly shifts to what “the boy” sees, to the perspective readers have already begun to share. “No one” saw “except the boy. And he watched with intense bright eyes, as he would watch a wild goose he had shot. Was it winged or dead? Dead!” Banford is no more than a bird, a hunter’s target. Aligned with the perspective of the boy, the passage treats a human death as no more than another

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sporting triumph. The witnesses are still anticipating, unaware even of the paragraph’s definitive last word: “Dead!” The tones of the rendition of this tragic action, or perhaps the action that produces what is (or will be) a tragedy for some, but not for the boy, are duplicitous insofar as they offer simultaneously two points of view, are ambivalent insofar as they balance triumph and anticipatory fear, fulfillment and grief. The discourse enacts the event’s timings, its ordering of perceptions, and finally its assignment of intention, for where the paragraph ends recasts its beginning to a knowing anticipation of death—a knowing that then reacts to the boy as a deliberate hunter, killer, murderer. In addition to its deliberate ambivalence, the tone of the description is both ponderous in its redundancies—a ponderousness that matches the gravity of the even—and strangely distanced, the scale of its analogies linking “the Banford” to hunter’s prey, removing the event from the local to something more global, and at the same time reducing its import from human to mere quotidian extinctions. The moment of revelation, of discovery, seems to arrive after a pause, despite the next paragraph repeating the word “immediately”: “Immediately he gave a loud cry. Immediately March gave a wild shriek that went far, far down the afternoon. And the father started a strange bellowing sound.” Contrasting the quite literal tones of the first shocked response, this brief paragraph describing the varied tones of the witnesses quickly characterizes their reactions to the tragedy. While the soldier merely gives “a loud cry,” March responds with a “wild shriek,” and Banford’s father with his “strange bellowing sound” becomes like an injured farm animal. The different tones of these three responses delineate three different attitudes toward Banford’s fate. “A loud cry” betrays no grief; it could mean anything from surprise to pain to jubilation. March’s “wild shriek” enacts sudden severe shock and grief. Banford’s father’s “bellowing” suggests a basic and profound reaction to loss. These three tones also enact these characters’ relations to the tragedy. The boy may well be happy to see his rival destroyed (especially since, well, he destroyed her, and curiously, perhaps the readers share the boy’s relief, since some may consider Banford annoying). March, who has been caught between Banford and the boy, responds with heartfelt shock. The father, with parental devotion, feels the grief of primal loss, inexpressible except as an uncontrolled, nonverbal keening.

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The next paragraph confirms the varied perspectives of this array of attitudes. The boy, it turns out, is indeed triumphant: The boy leapt the fence and ran to the fringe. The back of the neck and head was a mass of blood, of horror. He turned it over. The body was quivering with little convulsions. But she was dead really. He knew it, that it was so. He knew it in his soul and his blood. The inner necessity of his life was fulfilling itself, it was he who was to live. The thorn was drawn out of his bowels. So he put her down gently. She was dead.3 Still the active party, “the boy” runs to his prey, rendered now in active verbs—“leapt,” “ran,” “he turned it over.” He sees the result of his action. Despite the “horror” of “the head and neck” as “a mass of blood,” despite the fact “that she was dead really,” or more likely because of that fact, he felt “the inner necessity of his life . . . fulfilling itself.” He tracks the bird he has just killed, sees the effects of his victory and is happy, fulfilled that “it was he who was to live.” The deceased Banford becomes to him a “thorn . . . drawn out of his bowels.” He is now, finally, gentle. “She was dead.” At the same time that the victor is confirming his spoils, depicted again in a detached and matter-of-fact tone, the others are mortified. “March was standing there petrified and absolutely motionless. Her face was dead white, her eyes big black pools. The old man was scrambling horribly over the fence.”4 In contrast to the paralysis and panic of the others, the boy’s feeling of survival, of having “fulfilled” the “inner necessity of his life,” becomes somewhat smug in tone, self-centered, selfish, and even cruel, despite his having “put her down gently” after he salvages the body from under the tree. This smug tone is produced, again, retroactively, as an effect of his own response to his own act, as the point of view of someone who sees his hopes realized. In retrospect, too, Henry becomes heartless, a murderer only out for his own gain. He could care less about Banford or the grief of the others. He is fulfilled. But finally, the tone of the description of the boy’s response also suggests the narrative’s slight admiration for a man who would go after his own fulfillment. This attitude, ironically, is produced by the tone’s apparent detachment, by its matter-of-fact narration of the boy’s deliberate actions, his ability to enjoy the fruits of his murder, to become the real manly hunter in an over-feminized rural

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scenario. This sense of victory is the sense of the return of true manly values to a circumstance warped by war. What is not clear is whether this triumphant tone is also, and at the same time, slightly ironic. Are we to admire Henry’s bravado, his manliness, and his ability to enjoy his triumph, or are we to rue the fact that the war hasn’t stopped, has come home in a sense, as Henry is still fighting the foes that disrupt his fulfillment? The tone is neutral enough in its impassive triumph to leave that question open. Describing Henry’s actions in a matter-of-fact tone but offering responses from Henry’s point-of-view sets out both tones simultaneously, each as an effect of the other.

Another Felling Oddly enough, she was one of the most thorough-going skeptics he had ever met, and possibly (this was a theory he used to make up to account for herself, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others), possibly she said to herself, as we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship (her favorite reading as a girl was Huxley and Tyndall, and they were fond of these nautical metaphors), as the whole thing is a bad joke, let us, at any rate, do our part; mitigate the sufferings of our fellowprisoners (Huxley again); decorate the dungeon with flowers and air-cushions; be as decent as we possibly can. Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,—her notion being that with the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that horrible affair. To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter. Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.5 Another rendition of death by falling tree also focuses on the effects of that accident on the witnessing survivors. The passage from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, introduces another character’s,

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Peter Walsh’s, estimations of how the death shaped the witness’s, Clarissa Dalloway’s, long-term worldview. Removed from the immediate scene of Clarissa’s sister Sylvia’s demise, narrated by a third-person narrator from the point of view of Peter who is ruminating on what had influenced Clarissa’s personality and had produced her skepticism, the rendition of the death focuses less on the tragic mechanics of the moment and more on its lasting effects on the witnessing Clarissa. The death itself, “that horrible affair,” appears indirectly, itself narrated as the effect of a parenthetical “carelessness”—“(all Justin Parr’s fault—all his carelessness)”— inserted in a sentence that offers a cause—the death—for its effects on Clarissa herself. “Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter.” Also inserted into the same sentence is the only brief description offered of the victim—“a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them.” As the entire event of the death by falling tree is rendered in a single sentence ruminated by Peter, the tragedy of the death becomes secondary to its effect on Clarissa from Peter’s perspective. But does this mitigate the tragic tone of the narration of the tragic event itself? The order of the recounting of events in the sentence not only layers a series of cause/effect relations from the most “horrible” to the “bitter” but locates the tragedy as a central, life-changing moment: “To see your own sister killed by a falling tree (all Justin Parry’s fault—all his carelessness) before your very eyes, a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them, Clarissa always said, was enough to turn one bitter.” The main clause of the sentence— “To see your own sister killed . . . Was enough to turn one bitter” encircles both the attribution of guilt, “All Justin Parry’s fault,” and her sister’s promise—“a girl too on the verge of life, the most gifted of them,” linked together as another recounting of the tragedy itself. As the inside cause to an outer effect, the tragedy becomes doubly tragic. Not only does it change Clarissa, it was the needless death of a “gifted” woman “on the verge of life.” As the sentence ends with Clarissa’s bitterness, so the entire event gains an aura of bitterness as recounted by Peter who is, in fact, focusing on Clarissa’s skeptical and bitter attitude toward life. The sentence about the death of Sylvia is itself located within Peter’s longer rumination about Clarissa’s philosophy of existence. He begins the paragraph with a discussion of her skepticism, that she believed “we are a doomed race, chained to a sinking ship.”

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He traces this attitude to authors Clarissa favored (Huxley and Tyndall), which produced in Clarissa a species of stoic reaction: “Those ruffians, the Gods, shan’t have it all their own way,— her notion being that with the Gods, who never lost a chance of hurting, thwarting and spoiling human lives were seriously put out if, all the same, you behaved like a lady. That phase came directly after Sylvia’s death—that horrible affair.” As Peter considers it, the needless death contributed to a skeptical attitude already in progress in a worldview that already had envisioned the Gods as nasty, capricious forces. This context produces a tone of defiance against the depressing and uncontrollable actions of “Gods” (or Justin Parry), so that not only does the tone of the depiction of the death as a causal tragedy carry the feel of regret occasioned by unnecessary loss, but it also anchors a larger attitude about the cruelties of human existence.6 While The Fox’s Henry might be fulfilled by ridding the world of his competition, Clarissa’s contumacious worldview derives from and embraces her sister’s death, a conclusion itself inflected by Peter’s attitude toward Clarissa as he attempts to analyze her attitude toward life. The narrative adds parenthetically: “(This was a theory he used to make up to account for herself, so transparent in some ways, so inscrutable in others.)” That Peter failed to win Clarissa itself conditions the ways he thinks about her, adding another layer of bitterness to the bitter stew he contrives in his thinking about her, though in the end Peter may be more bitter than the defiant Clarissa who, in his eyes, not only stood up against the Gods but also against him. All of these histories, perspectives, and attitudes circulate and layer, just as in the novel, the description of one event is often parenthetically intercalated with another, as in “(all Justin Parr’s fault—all his carelessness).” The tone of the passage, thus, emerges from its diction, syntax, punctuation, the circumstances that account for a narrative point of view, the attitudes reflected in later analyses (regret, disappointment) just as Peter rationalizes Clarissa’s attitude as a result both of her teen reading habits and the tragedy of being witness to her sister’s death. All of that circles to explain to Peter why Clarissa, who was determined to face adversity with the sangfroid of a lady, chose Dalloway over himself. Peter’s account adds one additional tonal layer; in addition to rationalizing Clarissa’s choices, the narration situates Peter himself

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as slightly bitter, still squelching his disappointment about his romantic failures. Depicting Peter as rationalizing both Clarissa’s bitterness and his own, the narrative offers a slightly bemused tone at the foibles of middle-aged regret, especially as Peter’s thoughts emerge just after he has stealthily followed a young woman to her doorstep, fantasizing the whole way. The circumstances swirl, shade, shift, color, and render the tone of the tragic memory opalescent and even more complex, orchestrating its shifts from thought to thought and phrase to phrase.

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From my diary, January 16, 2018: It is a “snow” day here in the Deep South. Challenged with the task of driving in the best of times, Houston drivers are perilously stumped by frozen precipitation. Spoken like a true Northerner and I’m only from Ohio. You should hear what the Michiganders say about it. When they are not swearing. Gloomy day. A good day to cherish gloomy tones. From Jonathan Harker’s journal, June 25: I bent over him, and tried to find any sign of life, but in vain. He could not have lain there long, for the earthy smell would have passed away in a few hours. By the side of the box was its cover, pierced with holes here and there. I thought he might have the keys on him, but when I went to search I saw the dead eyes, and in them dead though they were, such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place, and leaving the Count’s room by the window, crawled again up the castle wall. Regaining my room, I threw myself panting upon the bed and tried to think.1 From my diary, January 16, 2018: With frigid winds blowing, I could not think of a gloomier tome than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Except maybe the central African gloom of Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. The misty rain outside is beginning to freeze, but the Muscovy ducks are still rambling around the boulevard intersection I can see from my window. That  feels

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almost too happy. What if I described the ducks as winging their fateful way across the sodden concrete expanse? Harker’s passage describes his daytime venture beyond his room, exiting, as does the Count, from his window, forced to use that mode of escape because the Count has locked him in. He makes his way to the window of the Count’s room to find there what he describes above. He “tried to find any sign of life, but in vain.” Although he describes an “earthy smell,” it is less an ambivalent sign of life than evidence that the Count had not been lying there dead for very long. Beside the box in which the Count is lying is the box’s cover, curiously “pierced with holes here and there.” The description has gone from signs of life, not found, to earthy smells, not yet dissipated, to the box’s cover, pierced with holes, a trajectory that progressively undoes any, perhaps dubious, sign of survival to end in the ambivalent appearance of the box’s cover which may be there to facilitate continued existence or may just be a sign of careless decay. But that the Count seems expired is not bad news to Harker, who is looking for the keys to unlock his chamber. Hence, the description seems like a check list: Life. Nope. How long? Not long. Box? Oddly perforated. Where are the keys? As Harker searches for the keys, however, the undead’s unclosed eyes arrest him: “I saw the dead eyes, and in them dead though they were, such a look of hate, though unconscious of me or my presence, that I fled from the place . . .” Seeing the eyes, Harker perceives “such a look of hate,” even through their lack of consciousness. The sentence begins with “dead eyes,” reaffirms their dead quality in the next clause, asserts their “look of hate,” unmotivated by any consciousness or object. The dead eyes of the dead, dead as they are, nonetheless still convey what seems to have been the Count’s motivating impetus. Seeing this, Harker flees, returning to his own room the way he came—via the window. “Panting” he threw himself “upon the bed and tried to think.” Certainly, finding a dead body with open, hate-filled eyes is gloomy, frightening, and creepy. But the sense of gloom here is produced as much by the way the sentences assert a quality—“sign of life,” “earthy smell,” open eyes—as by the way they might expunge any possibility of viable endurance. While the structure of these repeated negations seems gloomy, the lack of life is a good sign for Harker, so that the passage’s feel of gloom and even threat derives from the gradual, step-by-step discovery of the



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Count’s status that responds to Harker’s desire that the Count not endure with persistent denials of signs of life. Searching and finding neither what he anticipated nor a release from threat exacerbates the passage’s gloom by persistently contrasting implied hope with discernments that are simultaneously hopeful and horrible.2 The chain of observations finally ends not only in disappointment but with an increasingly horrific insight. Harker might hope the Count is dead (a gloomy impetus already), but his death is not as dire as the hint of potentially prolonged terror that survives it. To his fearful dismay, Harker does find something that has endured, the hate that survives mortality. He finds one key—hate— instead of the room key he was seeking. The hate that outlasts existence drives him back to the uncertain sanctuary of his room. What Harker finds when he delves is not his own release, but the animus motivating the Count’s appetites. Harker is writing in his journal, a document that imagines two audiences: the writer so as to recall his experiences, and some reader who survives him in the event that the worst happens or in case what he experiences is so incredible that a record would be invaluable. The novel itself begins with an explanation of the organization of its various accounts: How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the stand-points and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.3 An extra layer assuring the accuracy of the facts that follow, the novel’s opening gambit already sets a dual tone: what you read is both completely reliable and incredible. All is fact recounted by eyewitnesses in a position to know. We might then expect the tone of the ensuing journal entries and letters to reflect this effort at objectivity, as that may have been slightly tempered by immediate experience. Harker intrepidly emerges from his window not only for the key to his room but also for the key to Count Dracula’s unusual behaviors. Harker’s

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description of his venture reads like a report of actions and results. But that sense of disinterested quest also expresses a mounting horror that seeps into the protocols of reportage. The journal’s function as testimony to the otherwise unbelievable, however, is also retrospective, written during his stay at the Count’s castle but read by others only after Harker has survived his trip to Dracula’s castle. The use of his descriptions in a future that already knows the end of the story casts a set of assumptions onto the past inscriptions of a character who is simultaneously curious, frightened, incredulous, and quite literally threatened by a figure who steals his clothes and exits each night to prey on the villagers. The passage’s veneer of detachment reflects as much an attempt to set forth facts as an attempt to squelch and restrain the panic of his discovery: it sets forth and holds back, just as Harker does in emerging from and returning to his chamber and just as the passage describes the progressive discovery/relief/horror represented by the Count’s body’s contradictory suspensions and effusions. The tone, thus, audiates as both fear and the attempt to quell that fear through rational description, hope and its dissipation, bravado and laudable retreat. Rationality overcomes Harker’s hysterical impetus, leaving as its relic the journalistic facts of the case, colored only by the situational bias of their observer. From my diary, January 17, 2018: The passage from Dracula reminds me of another literary wraith—Mr. Kurtz from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.4 It occurred to me yesterday, but it seems even more a propos today as Houston endures a sunny 20 degrees, closing universities and businesses. Ha. More time to write. Whereas Harker’s account is a “journal,” Marlow’s is a tale told aboard ship to other seafarers. Both of these novels, from different sub-genres, make some commentary about the genesis of their inscription. Just as Dracula poses itself as eyewitness accounts, offered from the beginning as reliable, Conrad’s novella persistently reminds readers of the situation of its telling, recalling us to the deck of a ship from time to time where Marlow is telling his story and commenting on his persona. The teller also reminds his hearers that what he is relating really is personal experience—that he is an eyewitness to the incredible.5 In both Dracula and Heart of Darkness, however, genre is a pretext that explains how the tales have been communicated.



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How much does genre itself cast a tone? And once coated with generic expectation, how do the elements of the text audiate within and beyond generic expectations? Because Marlow’s tale is a sailor’s yarn, we might expect its tone to be less reliable in some ways (insofar as a tale-teller might be tempted to exaggerate), but very reliable in others insofar as it is an eyewitness account. Like Harker’s journal, Marlow’s reminiscence explicitly delves into darkness, as he begins his account as follows: “‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’”6 He begins his tale of darkness with a sympathetic description of what a Roman soldier must have once felt as he had “to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”7 Much like Harker’s journal, Marlow’s tale describes an encounter with the unnamable, whose face generates hate in one way or another. Having taken a job as the captain of a steamboat plying a river in a colonized portion of central Africa, Marlow details his experiences observing the ways the colonial administrators worked, paying special attention to rumors about one particularly successful upriver agent named “Kurtz.” Marlow’s account partly focuses on and circulates around Kurtz, who becomes the desired, fascinating, unknown mystery of colonial administration as well as Marlow’s own hesitant object of identification and admiration. Once Marlow has repaired the steamboat, the colonial manager takes a trip upstream to rescue Kurtz, who has presumably become ill. When Marlow and the company boat have made it to Kurtz’s station and Marlow has encountered the itinerant Russian sailor whose abandoned the camp they had discovered a bit downstream, Marlow is poised finally to meet Mr. Kurtz, the figure about whom he has heard so much and with whom he has imagined a sort of brothers-in-arms sympathy. At Kurtz’s station, Marlow finally sees the figure from afar. Cautioned by the Russian’s caveats, Marlow and the Russian stand aside to witness Kurtz’s men bringing him to the river boat on a stretcher: The knot of men with the stretcher had stopped too, half-way to the steamer, as if petrified. I saw the man on the stretcher sit up, lank and with an uplifted arm, above the shoulders of the bearers.

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“Let us hope that the man who can talk so well of love in general will find some particular reason to spare us this time,” I said. I resented bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonouring necessity. I could not hear a sound, but through my glasses I saw the thin arm extended commandingly, the lower jaw moving, the eyes of that apparition shining darkly far in its boney head that nodded with grotesque jerks. Kurtz—Kurtz—that means “short” in German—don’t it? We’ll, the name was as true as everything else in his life—and death. He looked at least seven feet long. His covering had fallen off, and his body emerged from it painful and appalling as from a winding sheet. I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving. It was as though an animated image of death carved out of old ivory had been shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.8 Having anticipated meeting this larger-than-life figure, the actual encounter reverses all anticipation with a version of the cadaverous grotesque. Marlow’s description of Kurtz’s body produces the passage’s tone of disappointed disgust and fascination. Looking through binoculars, Marlow sees (but does not hear) the apparition that Kurtz has become, a figure with “a lank and uplifted arm,” “a thin arm extended commandingly,” “a lower jaw moving,” with a “boney head” nodding “with grotesque jerks.” Marlow could see Kurtz’s rib cage, “the bones of his arm waving.” All of this adds up, in Marlow’s estimation, to “an animated image of death carved out of old ivory.” In addition to the sense (yet again) of something undead, Marlow offers some commentary about the figure upon whom he had pinned his hope. Over the passage’s spectacular gloom layers a tonal veneer of the sardonic. Marlowe resents “bitterly the absurd danger of our situation, as if to be at the mercy of that atrocious phantom had been a dishonouring necessity.” The adjectives “absurd” and “atrocious” intensify Marlow’s feelings about Kurtz from simple disdain to active contempt. Kurtz is the opposite of what Marlow had hoped he would be. Instead of the inspired diplomat, Kurtz is an “apparition,” “an atrocious phantom,” the ghostly shadow of a wise and insightful trader. As Marlow notes acerbically, “Kurtz— Kurtz—that means ‘short’ in German—don’t it? Well, the name



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was as true as everything else in his life—and death. He looked at least seven feet long.” Marlow’s images of the gesticulating skeleton reduce Kurtz to a macabre “image of death,” but one that still commands, “shaking its hand with menaces at a motionless crowd of men made of dark and glittering bronze.” Marlow’s description of his first look at Kurtz enacts his disappointment, layering that disappointment with defenses against it in the form of mordant characterizations of Kurtz’s incommensurately cadaverous command, an absurdity that undoes any of Kurtz’s former mystique. The tone of the passage mingles anticipation, disappointment, sardonic defensiveness, a sense of the absurdity of the entire colonial operation, and a measured disgust at himself for wanting to believe in a figure such as Kurtz, a disgust also suggested by his commenting sarcastically on the inaptness of Kurtz’s name. Marlow’s initial apprehension of Kurtz prepares the way for Kurtz’s deathbed revelation of his degradation—“the horror.” It also enacts tonally the turn in Marlow’s tale from his initial dubious assessment of colonial policy to the exemplary weight of Marlow’s unvoiced contemplation of the tragic significance of Kurtz’s failures. For if Marlow is comparing “dark places” whose common element is colonization, and if Marlow is recounting that darkness from the point of view of the colonizer, then what his tale presents is the effects of colonial policy on presumably formerly upstanding figures as well as on his own beliefs, despite his dubious entry into colonial employ. This tone then effects a more extended cultural commentary on “darkness” itself as that which misleads humans into thinking they are gods. From my diary, January 19, 2018: Does it make any difference that I have announced this text as “diary” text? Do we unwittingly audiate any feel of confidentiality? Or, did I need actually to provide some vaguely scandalous commentary to make the diary pretext more “genuine”? I mean, who writes this kind of analysis in a diary?

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10 Touch Tone

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.1

Isn’t That the Way It Always Goes? That texts enact some of their tone via reader’s unconscious retrospection as they read forward and backward at the same time suggests that the processes of audiation rove texts, accruing and enwrapping one tone with another in a growing bank of elements and shifting attitudes. Readerly expectations also inflect this amassing sense of tone: cues about what might be appropriate to a specific genre, introductory hints about the direction of the plot, even the effects of familiarity with an author’s previous work or reputation anticipate, prepare for, and actually produce a portion of a text’s tone. Creating expectations through such tactics as titles (expectations that might also be disappointed), repeated harbingers such as evocations of tragedy or warning phone calls, the circumstances of the telling, or even ironically cast evocations of cultural “truths” all influence tone from the very beginning, suggesting that tone derives not only from what is on a page but also from events and characters in the narrative, and finally from sets of attitudes keyed by such signifiers as genre, cultural context, and elements of literary history that (or may not) circulate culturally. But the opening lines of a text are sometimes the most telling of tonal harbingers, as is, for example, the opening line of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally

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acknowledged that a young gentleman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Not only does this initial sentence enact the doubled tone of slight irony that characterizes the novel, evoking a “universal acknowledgement” as a way to locate its announcement of outcome at the same time that it draws attention to that announcement as the dubious effects of either fictional habit or wishful thinking, but it also deploys a formal language (“young gentleman in possession of a good fortune”) as a way both to announce and parody the class politics and romance novel hopes attendant to the introduction of these circumstances.2 The line enacts the vaguely ironic tone of the novel in announcing both its genre and more or less where the novel is going. But how do we know this opening line is not misleading or sarcastic? Because its irony is gentle, its diction dressed in delicate terms, its tone both knowing and amiably parodic, referring both to the text it commences and to its genre. At the same time that we already know where the novel is going, we don’t know which rich “young gentleman” and which eligible young women will end up making the match. Anticipating this narrative fulfillment, we audiate the ironies of tone at an enjoyable distance, as a species of knowing and beneficent tolerance that comes with an ironic perspective on the predictability of an established literary genre. More lugubrious texts, as we have seen, also announce their descent into darkness with their titles, and in both cases in the previous section, with an enframed first-person account. While the reliability of the accounts derives from their eyewitness, almost journalistic, reportage (okay, well not Marlow, whose seaman’s imaginary suggests some level of embellishment), the harbinger of horror in each is an expectation of a darkness narrated from personal experience, which seems to render that horror more immediate and trustworthy. Both Dracula and Heart of Darkness signal their horror in pre-textual elements. In Dracula, the framing comment about the way the accounts were collected simultaneously insures the reliability of their telling and the darkness of their subject matter. In Heart of Darkness, the ship awaiting the evening tide becomes the environment for Marlow’s re-rendering of evening as akin to the experience of darkness he is about to impart. Both signal a descent into something unbelievably horrible through multiple tactics that combine genre, plot expectations, character types, setting, and tone.



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How, then, does tone cue expectations (which then return to calibrate tone, ad infinitum, cybernetically) when a text combines the vaguely ironic tone of Pride and Prejudice with what appear to be mundane but somehow potentially dire circumstances? The first paragraph of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” exemplifies one strategy through which this occurs: The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here, Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here is this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.3 At first glance, the introductory paragraph seems domestic and mundane. The passage’s third-person narrator presents the point of view of the grandmother, first asserting a predilection, then filling in motivations for it. She “didn’t want to go to Florida.” We don’t know why. Oh, she wants to go to Tennessee to visit relatives. She is trying to convince Bailey. Who is Bailey? Oh, he is her son, middle aged, “bald,” “her only boy,” unremarkably reading the sports page of the newspaper. The newspaper. Hmm. It seems to have contained some notable news that offers a rationale that might undergird the grandmother’s unexpressed wish. The grandmother, too, seems to be reading the paper. She insists that her son put aside the sports page and read what she is reading. There is a prisoner “aloose” from the penitentiary and he is “headed toward Florida.” But that is not all. She adds more of her impressions of the news item. She instructs Bailey to read “what it says he did to these people.” The paragraph returns to the grandmother’s first motivation—not wanting to go to Florida. Now there is another reason. And she trumps her insistence by resorting to her “conscience” as the arbiter that raises the stakes to the level of morality and punishment. But like the convict who is “aloose,” the grandmother, too, is devious, trying to bend her son

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to her will without revealing the reason. What will this combination of factors reap? It all seems so innocent and mundane, and yet . . . Enacting a tone of chiding domestic comedy focused around an elderly woman’s preferences and fears of the unlikely, the very first lines of the story signal that no matter what the characters intend or what kind of control Bailey or the Grandmother can exert, the family will end up in The Misfit’s clutches. Somehow this first line is already ironic, but how do we know that it means what it says but that what it says portends something far more ironic than the simple statement would suggest? Do we already retroactively recoat these first few lines with what we know after we have read the story? Can we ever read the story the same way again? Do we already sense this ultimate irony the first time we read? Are there already signals of what really is the irony of non-irony (or a situational irony piled atop a vague performance of misdirection or dishonesty) in the first few lines themselves? How do we audiate these when we read?4 The opening line seems to be a straightforward declarative sentence from a third-person omniscient narrator who is privy to the grandmother’s preferences. “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” That the first sentence refers to the character as “the grandmother,” and not by name or terms expressing a bit more fondness or proximity locates her at some distance from both the narrator and readers. We don’t know what produces that distance: the narrator’s perspective that enters into this breakfast conversation from an imaginary site that envisions this scene as if from a cinematic long shot (something like an establishment shot of the entire family around the table), or if this is from beyond some passage of time, or both. The simple declarative sentence offers an apparently innocent, straightforward, matter-of-fact opening to the story, while at the same time hinting that what seems innocent and straightforward is not so at all. How matter-of-fact is this opening sentence, really? It is a simple declarative statement of a sentiment the grandmother has that she does not communicate, but instead uses as the basis (conscious or unconscious) for her subsequent manipulations aided by a news item that seems random and whose apparent unlikelihood makes it appear that the grandmother is grasping at, albeit dramatic, straws. The incommensurability between the announced motivation and the news item about The Misfit—their very lack of obvious connection or correlation—produces the very correlation the situation seems to offer as unlikely. The irony of this opening, then, exists in the simultaneous



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staging of distinctions and connections between its matter-of-fact tone, the vaguely distanced observing narrator, and the apparently chance newspaper story about an escaped convict. Distance here signals connection, ironically. Associating the grandmother’s desire and The Misfit’s tangent of escape already means they are connected and not randomly, even as the tone of the passage would seem almost hyperbolically quotidian. The only tonal sign that it isn’t—a sign that then retroactively recalibrates the opening as ironically ironic—is that the passage focuses on a characterization of the grandmother both as harboring secret motivations and as unrelenting in her attempts to manipulate her son. Even this would not offer any situational irony in itself except in the combination of the grandmother’s attempt at misdirection and the apparently random introduction of The Misfit, which, because we know this is a story, we also know is really not random at all. The near irony of the random connection between the grandmother’s wishes and the appearance of reports about The Misfit in the paper sets the stage for the situational irony to come, which, though it has not arrived and we know nothing about it, we can already predict because of the way the paragraph already aligns its unlikely elements. These intimations of irony immediately and retrospectively gloss the passage’s possible tonal irony with the irony of the situation to come. The moment the grandmother manipulates Bailey to her wishes will be the moment they end up moving toward instead of away from The Misfit. The opening paragraph’s layering of opposing wishes and directions also sets another kind of irony—the one in which we know how the story will go because it won’t go the way we know the story will go because it already tells us that the way it will go is not the way it seems to indicate that it will go. This intro stages a story about a family—a grandmother (okay, a vaguely devious grandmother) and a son and his family—who are apparently taking a road trip, though apart from what the paragraph insinuates, it makes no actual mention thereof. The grandmother wants to go a different direction than that which the paragraph hints the son wishes to go. Insinuating their directional odds sets up a dynamic of oppositions and contrariness, which then suggests that whatever they want or think they are doing, they will be doing the opposite. The dynamic of contrariness initiates structural irony by enacting the narrative’s dynamic logic from the start. In this context, the tone of the passage derives from the predictability of an ironic reversal in the narrative

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established by the contrary feel between the passage’s quotidian language, its mapping of contradictory desires, its circumstantial and absurdly unlikely connection between the trip and a fleeing convict, and its apparent modesty—its offering of mundane details such as Bailey’s “bald head” and the fact that the sports page is “orange.” The story’s tone that derives from a species of “bounce-back” irony offers, thus, a harbinger of the story to come, even if the intro’s ironic feel comes from what we already anticipate. Insofar as we read this intro both as ironic and as introducing a greater irony, which is, ironically, not so ironic since we sense the irony is coming, we also read the story itself as ironic, instead of, as we might have, tragic. The ironic harbinger insulates readers from the story’s absurd tragedy, which, ironically, is the point of the irony in the first place. But, then again, the story already initiates this ironic prophylaxis in the tonal distance with which it commences, which vaguely discourages too much familiarity or identification with the characters, and instead encourages a view of the grandmother as unsympathetically selfwilled and silly, while (perhaps again ironically) offering a comment on the limited tactics the elderly might devise to get what they want. The tone is, in essence, ouroboric, its irony deriving from the story and the story deriving its tone from the intro’s irony. But, wait a minute! This story really begins with the title: “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” A quip, an adage, the title itself offers an initial irony. Sadly, it is difficult to locate those we would like to locate. There is not much quality in the world. Although the story’s title and its first paragraph seem to have nothing to do with one another, it is difficult not to associate them. The tone of the title quip leaks over. We are full of modern day weltschmerz. Even if the introductory paragraph offers no examples of a good man, making the title itself seem momentarily not so ironic, the likelihood that they will encounter The Misfit ironically redefines “Good Man” as its opposite, which it turns out, is not so difficult to find.

Harbinger “Remember You Must Die” The telephone rang. She lifted the receiver. As she had feared the man spoke before she could say a word. When he had spoken the familiar sentence she said, “Who is that speaking, who is it?”5



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A literal harbinger, the phone call, interrupts immediately after Memento Mori’s brief introductory paragraph describing Dame Lettie Colton writing a letter. Her letter, cited after a single sentence, reads: “One of these days I hope you will write as brilliantly on a happier theme. In these days of cold war I do feel we should soar above the murk & smog & get into the clear crystal.” Dame Lettie fears the phone call, or what the anonymous caller reminds her when he speaks. She reports the call, as she had before, telling the assistant inspector, “It has occurred again.” Beginning thus in medias res, the novel Memento Mori focuses on harbingers of coming tragedy, anonymous phone calls to various elderly characters that remind them of the death they already know must come, with the telephonic augury installing a far more dire tone to daily life. The novel’s third-person narration of the receipt of these calls is, like Flannery O’Connor’s story’s narrator, tonally detached and a bit distant, offering more than a page of dialogue and quoted letter to begin the novel. The narrator’s tone performs as merely descriptive, until the phone call comes—a phone call whose “familiar sentence” remains undefined. But the threat is there. The very fact of the threat, even though we do not yet know its content, is enough to alter the tone of the opening pages of the novel. Like Dame Lettie, we are reminded, the plot is out in the open and we read the rest of the novel waiting repeatedly with victim after victim, for the inevitable to arrive, presaged always by a harbinger phone call, a mysterious and unidentified caller, and the death of the recipient not too soon after. The irony, of course, is that the phone caller is telling the recipients what they already know in the abstract: that they will, someday, die. Reminding them to remember this is reminding them of the inevitable, bringing it to the fore, haunting them with the truth. This is the way the story always goes. Memento mori. The tone this reminder produces, even as the text does not specifically present it at first, is anxiety. Along with the book’s title, the anonymous phone call and its mysterious message produce exactly the reminder in readers that the calls produce in their recipients. The novel relieves its readers apparently, at least at first, by shifting from one aged character to another. But all of them receive these calls, so that the cumulative effect of this constant barrage might be one of overwhelming despondency.6

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Except, there is something vaguely comic in the businesslike way each telephonic victim works to deny the message in dealing with the calls as pranks from the very beginning, as Dame Lettie immediately telephones the assistant inspector to report that she has received another call. After calling the inspector, Dame Lettie calls her brother, Godfrey, for additional reassurance, telling Godfrey, “There is no danger. It is merely a disturbance.”7 And, to allay her fears, Godfrey agrees: “He must be a maniac.”8 Tonally, the opening of Memento Mori shifts from oddly threatening to anxiety, perpetuated by the very tactics and tones the characters deploy to allay their fears. Combining the ominousness of a report of an anonymous voice proclaiming the inevitability of death to the mundanity of reducing the voice to insanity produces desperation reflected in the way the tones of the characters’ dialogue simultaneously try to rationalize the situation and allay the panic that underlies it all. This is no successful masquerade; we all always know they are enacting the rationalization requisite to going on. The tone’s layering of responses operates like a musical chord with four separate notes: fear, desperation, anxiety, and the false and only vaguely calming discourse that tries to allay what it cannot allay, providing only a thin skin of protection. There is something very creepy about this sounding that gathers through the novel’s first page as the drama of the call and its layering responses set the barely restrained tone of the rest of the novel. The harbinger of death sets a tone that is itself a harbinger of the inevitable.

Plotting Tone Both of these narratives play out some of the ouroboric relations telling produces in relation to plot. Tone—even the perverse tone of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—keys expectations about plot, which the story then simultaneously reconfirms and shifts, forcing a re-audiation of the tone, which then produces slightly different expectations, etc. The telling is not simply a rendition of story. Story is the combination of telling, tone, plot, character, setting, motifs, related systemically, persistently revising one another, engaging a reading that goes forward and backward at the same time in a production that is ever morphing.

11 Tense Tone

“And the material doesn’t stain,” the salesgirl says. “Doesn’t stain?” “It’s the new fabric,” the salesgirl says. “Specially treated. Won’t mark. If you spill like a bit of ice-cream or a drop of coffee, like, down the front of this dress it won’t hold the stain.” The customer, a young woman, is suddenly tearing at the fastener at the neck, pulling at the zip of the dress. She is saying, “Get this thing off me. Off me, at once.” The salesgirl shouts at the customer who, up to now, has been delighted with the bright coloured dress. It is patterned with green and purple squares on a white background, with blue spots within the green squares, cyclamen spots within the purple. This dress has not been a successful line; other dresses in the new stainless fabric have sold, but this, of which three others, identical but for sizes, hang in the back storeroom, awaiting the drastic reductions of next week’s sale, has been too vivid for most customers’ taste. But the customer who now steps speedily out of it, throwing it on the floor with the utmost irritation, had almost smiled with satisfaction when she had tried it on. She had said, “That’s

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my dress.” The salesgirl had said it needed taking up at the hem. “All right,” the customer had said, “but I need it for tomorrow.” “We can’t do it before Friday, I’m sorry,” the salesgirl had said. “Oh, I’ll do it myself, then,” the customer had said, and turned round to admire it sideways in the long mirror. “It’s a good fit. Lovely colors.” “And it doesn’t stain,” the salesgirl had said, with her eye wandering to another unstainable and equally unsaleable summer dress which evidently, she hoped, now, to offer the satisfied customer. “Doesn’t stain?” The customer has flung the dress aside.1 I am writing now at somewhere near the middle of what I hope is a book. It occurs to me at long last that verb tenses contribute to the production of tone. Duh. I notice that I only notice tenses when they vary from the more-or-less expected past tense. Passé simple. This past tense is the tense that provides the illusion that a story is a recounting of events that have previously occurred. Reliable because redundant. Reportage. Past tense can frame present as well as the past perfect. Doing so layers temporalities in an even more convincing trompe l’oeil, simple past becoming the host to other pasts that layer atop one another. In drawing attention to these others, the text makes us forget about the frame itself. This is the hoaxic structure of narrating that in layering the times of tellings, deploys the presence of an assumed previous event/telling to guarantee the status of the current rendition as an implied retelling. I notice that my previous example is never in simple past tense. The verbs are only in present, present continuous, present perfect, and past perfect tenses. The text recounts events as if from the present, as if they are happening as I read, even though I also understand this “now” as a “then,” narrated as if contemporaneous with the telling, but at some past point. It feels as if I am picking up an artifact, not exactly a recording but an eyewitness account, written as it is being observed so as to seem to have been observed as it is happening. It layers its overt present with a positional past by implication.



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But the verb tenses are also doing more than that. When the text deploys present and present continuous verb tenses, its tone is odd—awkward even—suggesting that something suspicious is happening—something that will be significant at some future point. I become concerned about what will happen next since I am privy to what is happening now and that must be significant because someone is narrating it now as it happens and not only narrating it, but circling, in its recounting, around certain points in a conversation. The passage’s “now” frames actions recounted in both present and past perfect tenses, actions that happened before the present I am witnessing. There is a short spate of present-perfect verbs in the passage, describing various states of the salability of a certain line of dresses: “The salesgirl shouts at the customer who, up to now, has been delighted with the bright coloured dress.” And “This dress has not been a successful line; other dresses in the new stainless fabric have sold.” These present-perfect clauses give way to past perfect descriptions: “But the customer who now steps speedily out of it, throwing it on the floor with the utmost irritation, had almost smiled with satisfaction when she had tried it on.” The remainder of the paragraph is in past perfect tense. It has gone from present and present continuous to present perfect to past perfect. From now to then, all layered as if causally, all pushing toward the storeroom, toward reductions in price, toward the stain that will never appear. Except . . . The narrative returns to its present-tense starting point. The introductory passage’s foray from present to present perfect to past perfect circles back to the present with which it began, to the exact same line, for which the ensuing passage does not in any way provide a rationale. The salesgirl, noting that the material “doesn’t stain,” seems to catalyze two trajectories. The first and most immediate is the customer tearing off the dress. The second is a recounting of the present-tense circumstances of the customer trying the dress on, which frames first a present-perfect account of the customer’s “delight” with the dress, then dress’s unsuccessful sales history, then the salesgirl noting that the fabric “doesn’t stain,” then the customer ripping off the dress. The passage’s circularity—its beginning and ending at the same point in the present as the customer rejects the dress she likes— suggests that the fabric’s failure to stain is a breaking point in the

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sale. The dress can record no past. The customer rejects neither the garish print nor its vivid palette, but, ironically, the fact that it doesn’t stain, something the sales girl clearly thinks is a selling point. But having already sold her customer on the dress, the salesgirl, it appears, goes one step too far. Who could imagine that being stain resistant would be the straw that breaks the sale’s back? I witness this exchange twice in 300 words. The novel opens with the salesgirl’s statement about stain and the customer’s odd reaction, and it ends this initial encounter with the same statement and reaction. It is as if time does not pass or veers continuously around the same cardinal moment, the repetition of which marks it as somehow significant, though as this passage is primarily in the present tense I have no idea why. “It doesn’t stain,” nonetheless stains, returns to its mark, a mark which is in the presence of the present of the potential for a stain that will not exist. What does this present circling portend? Repetition augments the salience of the event. The quotidian tone of the rendition in third-person present, distanced, with no names or even descriptions of the characters maroons this initial event, itself a gaudy circle in a secondary-hued square on a patterned dress about to have its price drastically reduced and which is too long for the customer who wants it until she finds out—gratuitously—that it doesn’t stain.2 Does she wish to leave a mark?

Tone Ongoing “Why, thank you so much, I’d adore to.” I don’t want to dance with him. I don’t want to dance with anybody. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be him. He’d be well down among the last ten. I’ve seen the way he dances; it looks like something you do on Saint Walpurgis Night. Just think, not a quarter of an hour ago, here I was sitting, feeling so sorry for the poor girl he was dancing with. And now I’m going to be the poor girl. Well, well. Isn’t it a small world?3 Posing the contrasting public and private responses of a terpsichorean victim, Dorothy Parker’s “The Waltz” enacts the present-tense discomfort of a present-tense waltz suffered by the story’s speaker as it is happening. Like the beginning of Spark’s



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novel, this narrative circles as does a waltz, but here it circles between socially appropriate public remarks and the private, frank commentary of a woman waltzing with a clumsy partner. That which the speaker had feared is also happening. The contrast between public behavior and private commentary creates part of the story’s humor, but most of the comedy is an effect of experiencing the character’s acerbic observations. The co-presence of these two perspectives produces irony upon irony: the irony of her polite responses which oppose her private characterizations, which are themselves combinations of hyperbolic comparisons, understatement, and wild irony.4 The earlier passage begins with the presentation of a statement in the present. It continues with commentary that both is simultaneous to her polite acceptance and reflects her reasons for dubiousness. From present-tense statements of her real feelings, the passage moves to hypothetical responses based upon her present-perfect tense observations of her looming partner. She compares these responses to her state of being “not a quarter of an hour ago,” when she was watching this same man dance with someone else—in the past continuous tense. The passage moves to what she anticipates and then to a final ironic comment: “Isn’t it a small world?” That I have selected both Spark’s novel and Parker’s story as exemplars of narratives recounted primarily in present tense may be an effect of my unconscious fascination with the seductiveness of present-tense narration. That they both circle around themselves, too, may be due to some unknown predilection on my part. But there also may be some connection between present-tense narration and circling. And if so why? And just to add to the heap: What tone emerges from this present-tense circling? My hypothesis at this point is that the tone of present-tense narration is highly ironic and it is so because its only contexts are implied pasts and futures or its own uncertain meanings. The opening of The Driver’s Seat implies a feeling that “at some point this moment will have been, ironically . . .” The unknown motivation for the woman’s rejection of stain-resistant fabric and the passage’s circling around that rejection marks the issue of stainresistance as somehow significant, but that something such as stainresistance would ever be significant already prepares for some irony to come. “The Waltz,” set up to present two opposing streams of sentiment, one honest, the other fake, encapsulates anticipated

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conflict, linking it to the irony of feared selection as a partner, as the two characters, one who expresses and the other entirely implied, literally circle (or whatever that guy is doing) around the dance floor. The story’s speaker’s observations encircle, festoon, collapse the events as they happen in a running commentary. While Spark’s novel commences with the hovering auspiciousness of a “now” moment whose import we do not yet know, Parker’s story plays with the consciousness and behaviors of a present experience. Spark’s novel is longitudinal; Parker’s has latitude. Both extend beyond themselves, openly circling around in a manner similar to the less obvious dynamics of retrospective resignification attendant to audiating tone in any text. While The Driver’s Seat, as we shall see, circles back to its opening moment by ultimately defining its significance—a significance we already suspect in the passage’s circling repetition—“The Waltz” plies its actions/reactions within its circling trajectory around the dance floor, shifting from inner monologue to dialogue, the one illuminating the other, the monologue implying a comic action in its running commentary upon it and at the same time characterizing both the speaker (by its reflective enactment of her personality) and her partner as well as their physical movements. The story is a story produced by and producing tone as the attitude of a voice in reaction to circumstances. We audiate the contrasting tones of the speaker’s responses, aloud and to herself. The story’s dynamics exist in and as the clash and inmixture of the speaker’s tones. “The Waltz” deploys comparisons between the “social” and the “frank” to produce irony. This ironic tone performs a complex layering of meaning, its antithesis, understatement, the evocation of other situations, the contrast between polite and sharply honest, a significance that glances off to the side. In this sense, the tone of present-tense narration includes an awareness of the failure of language in itself to convey the complexity of contrary feelings—hence the essential irony of speaking at all and hence the pervasiveness of a range of ironic tonalities from “The Waltz”’s “I’m so glad I brought it to his attention that this is a waltz they’re playing. Heaven knows what might have happened, if he had thought it was something fast; we’d have blown the sides right out of the building”5 to Why, I’m getting positively drawn to the Triple Threat here. He’s my hero. He has the heart of a lion and the sinews of a



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buffalo. Look at him—never a thought of the consequences, never afraid of his face, hurling himself into every scrimmage, eyes shining, cheeks ablaze. And shall it ever be said that I hung back? No, a thousand times no. What’s it to me if I have to spend the next couple of years in a plaster cast? Come on, Butch, right through them! Who wants to live forever?6 For whom does this narrator/character perform this commentary? Is this a way of palliating her own fear and disgust at the situation, a way of taking control? Is it a way of commenting on the inequities of sex roles in a patriarchal culture that assumes female admiration of male action, no matter what? All of these? The character can offer what she says because she says it, presumably, to herself. She is unfettered, non-self-reflective, uncontrolled, yet still restrained in the tonal complexities of an irony that both inhibits and frees.

The Mark of the Present Is the Future Lise, the customer in the opening scene of The Driver’s Seat, travels to a foreign city. “She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds,” the third chapter begins, “her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is traveling on the flight now boarding at gate 14.”7 Present tense shifts to future perfect; the significance of the need for a stain becomes perhaps more apparent. But that the novel announces its conclusion at the beginning of the third chapter renders the still primarily present-tense account far more fateful, each present action more significant in its being recounted at all. The tone of the novel takes on this layer of impending doom, which retroactively resignifies the sense of vague peril in the novel’s opening with an apprehension akin to but the reverse of most detective fiction. Instead of calculating the possible value of clues that lead to the identity of some unknown perpetrator, The Driver’s Seat offers the facts of Lise’s day as potentially significant to the causes, effects, cues, motives, and/or plans for her own death by the hand of another. The tone, already audiated as a suspicious present tense, becomes a present leading to a certain future, knowledge of which renders the present preemptively significant and tragic, especially

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as the novel offers no motive, no insight into Lise’s character that would account for her actions or enable identification with or even pity on her. The novel ends, as already announced, with Lise’s murder at the hands of a mental patient she takes up with at the recommendation of his aunt. After she instructs him how to kill her, he does so, all narrated in present tense. But the novel’s final paragraph appears in future tense: “He runs to the car, taking his chance and knowing that he will at last be taken, and seeing already as he drives away from the Pavilion and away, the sad little office where the police clank in and out and the typewriter ticks out his unnerving statement.”8 The statement itself appears in present tense, but the final sentence of the paragraph returns to a present version of the future: “He sees already the gleaming buttons of the policemen’s uniforms, hears the cold and the confiding, the hot and the barking voices, sees already the holsters and epaulets and all those trappings devised to protect them from the indecent exposure of fear and pity, pity and Fear.”9 The question at the end perhaps is finally this: Whose fear and pity are exposed? Certainly not the readers’, who may once again retroactively re-audiate the recountings that have preceded this final moment, realizing perhaps that they have read in fearful anticipation in reaction to a complex tone that, while never evincing or coaxing pity, had always suspended readers in unease and dread. Where do I go now in this present which seems the zero point, an evenness that can only go where it is?

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If the tone of a text reflexively contributes to the production of the illusion of voice—a speaker whose attitudes and personality tone produces as it performs—then what happens if the text produces a plural instead of singular narrator—a “we”? Can tone elicit plurality? Can plurality enact tone? And if so what is the tone of many? And what difference does quantity make? At this midpoint in this extended examination of tone, I might again ask why being aware of and discerning tone is an important part of reading, literary criticism, and writing. In a way tone tells us how to read as we read in a dynamic of reciprocity in which readers presumably audiate and discern a sense of tone from the syntax, diction, events depicted, and cultural contexts of a text. Via tone, texts also enact attitudes toward both what they represent and the recipients of their communications. Part of tone might be a covert appeal that readers (whatever that imaginary construct might represent) be amazed, shocked, chastised, disgusted, enlightened, stimulated to reconsideration, or catalyzed to action. Tone occasionally signals that the narrative voice is treating its readers as confidants, pupils, friends, or slightly hostile audiences. Most of this we glean unconsciously as an aspect of the text’s tone, to which we usually also do not pay much attention unless the tone is unusual (as in the case, for example, of texts told in the present or future tense as in Tone XI supra), or as a text shifts from first-person narrator to another first-person narrator where tone of voice becomes a preeminent part of characterization. But that sense of the vague purpose of address is always there, even if the tone reflects a detached narrative voice. Even the most “distanced” or “indirect” tone (where “distance” is the audiation of a sense of

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a voice’s detachment, apparent objectivity, functional relationship, structural displacement, or other imaginary links to the material it narrates) may produce a sense of the reader as an equal.1 Some of this sense of a narration’s tone that constructs and positions the sense of a reader, too, is subjective, as is a sense of what the tone of a passage itself might be. And some sense of an implied imaginary reader’s role emerges from the concatenation of address and reception, as various readers discern how the text is suggesting they read, and as texts themselves shift that address within narratives, as does, for example, the narrator in Heart of Darkness when he alternates between addressing the reader and narrating what Marlow narrates, or when the narrator of E. M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread interrupts one strain of telling to offer brief commentary about character or the ultimate direction of events. For example in Where Angels Fear to Tread, when Philip, brother-in-law of the deceased Lilia (who had gone off to Italy, married an Italian, had a baby, and died), returns to Italy to retrieve Lilia’s son, he changes his opinion about the relative value of Italians at an opera performance, which seems to catalyze the revision of his opinion about many other people and life in general: What did the baby matter when the world was suddenly right way up? Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling and smiled again. For romance had come back to Italy; there were no cads in her, she was beautiful, courteous, lovable, as of old. And Miss Abbott—she, too, was beautiful in her way, for all her gaucheness and conventionality. And Harriet—even Harriet tried. This admirable change in Philip proceeds from nothing admirable, and may therefore provoke the gibes of the cynical. But angels and other practical people will accept it reverently, and write it down as good.2 This passage begins with third-person narration from the point of view of Philip, but the voice is nonetheless a bit distanced insofar as it narrates and is conscious of Philip’s self-consciousness of his own processes—a self-consciousness (“Philip smiled, and was shocked at himself for smiling and smiled again.”) that also draws attention to consciousness itself, including a consciousness of the slightly wry,



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slightly ironic tone of the passage, also signaled by the deployment of vaguely hackneyed descriptions of Italy as romantic, “beautiful, courteous, lovable” and no longer full of the “cads” and righteous neighbors (e.g., Miss Abbott) the affairs of Philip’s sister-in-law had generated.3 Following this self-conscious consciousness of Philip’s grand attitudinal shift, the next paragraph shifts from Philip’s point of view to a narratorial intrusion in the form of a commentary to the readers about how they might understand Philip’s transformation. Noting that it “proceeds from nothing admirable,” the narrator suggests readers might hence be cynical. Or if the readers are “angels and other practical people,” they might take the change optimistically. In offering a meditation about the shape of events itself, the text produces a narrator who suddenly seems to stand at some distance from what the text has just recounted, noting, perhaps defensively, the relation between Philip’s insight and his previous character and deflecting potential readerly cynicism by perversely admitting it, while suggesting that “angels and other practical people” might embrace the moment more positively.4 But in linking “angels” to the category of “other practical people,” the text simultaneously suggests the degree of kindness required while cynically linking that kindness to practicality. This connection, then, makes fun of optimists while offering a pragmatic response so readers may continue happily. This second paragraph is an overt example not only of the text suggesting the attitude with which readers might approach a text but also of the way it cleverly comments on perversity—its own and that of the characters. In the end, this layering of commentary has the effect of situating readers themselves in a more detached evaluative stance, at the same time as the passage’s apparently distanced tone about attitudes communicates that the narrative itself has some species of self-knowledge. This tonal self-consciousness draws attention to the possible absurdity of Philip’s sudden return to his original love affair with all things Italian, the possible superficiality of his character, and the potentially ludicrous romanticism of the narrative itself, unless, of course, warning readers it knows it is being romantic enables the text to transform itself (and its readers) back into an acceptable and appropriately distanced cynicism, a tone the passage already enacts. In any case, the text clearly suggests a range of possible readerly positions from cynical realism

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to romantic idealism and everything in between. Ironically, the one alliance to which the text does not draw attention is the readers’ alignment with the narrator, which is the imaginary agency through which the text performs its commentary on reception. Now we— narrator and readers—all regard the transformation from the point of view of the verisimilitude, likelihood, and general satisfaction of the larger narrative. Do actual readers accept and adopt the readerly position into which a text’s tone locates them? When we read, do we acquiesce to this? We may not acquiesce when we identify a tone we do not like (though we may not identify what we don’t like as tone) or when we resent, often unconsciously, the text positioning us in a certain way. In his Aspects of the Novel, Forster begins his chapter on “The Story” with an example of the relation between tone and concepts of story and readership: “We shall all agree that the fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling aspect, but we shall voice our assent in different tones, and it is on the precise tone of voice we employ now that our subsequent conclusions will depend.”5 Tone makes the argument in Forster’s ensuing examples, literally locating readers as such in a categorization of tropes based precisely on tone. “Let us listen to three voices,” Forster exhorts. To the question of “What does a novel do?” One species of reader responds, “Placidly: ‘Well—I don’t know—it seems a funny sort of question to ask—a novel’s a novel—well, I don’t know—I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.’”6 Based on the speaker’s tone, Forster envisions this first respondent as “good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor-bus at the same time.”7 The second type he envisions “as on a golf course . . . .”8 He is “aggressive and brisk.”9 “What does a novel do? Why, tell a story, of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, no doubt, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same.”10 The third respondent with a “drooping regretful voice” offers: “Yes— oh, dear, yes—the novel tells a story.”11 Forster’s responses to these three are probably predictable. “I respect and admire the first speaker,” he notes. “I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself.”12 Not only does Forster’s essay on the novel intricate tone, story, and readers’ expectations, but it accounts for the novel as a combination of story and tone, where



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the tone of telling is a large part of readers’ motivation to persist as long as the story itself provides impetus in the form of continued mystery.

The Dulcet Tones of Chastising Evangelism Some texts, however, enact distasteful, chastising, or presumptive tones that put readers off, just as the second of Forster’s three opiners annoys Forster. Forster’s example locates the source of his distaste in the predilections of the speaker whose attitude indicates both a reductive notion of the possibilities of story and an unpleasant preemptive personality. If that personality were to undertake narration, readers might also be perturbed by his tone. Just as the second interviewee evinces an almost self-righteous attitude that dismisses all other points of view, so too do some narrators in texts presenting arguments enact a self-righteous, sanctimonious, and/or condescending tone to readers who can choose only to agree with the narrator, see themselves as wrong, or terminate their reading altogether. While adopting such smug, self-righteous or sanctimonious tones in a critical argument would seem to work against argumentation’s persuasive purposes, and although readers may often regard such a tone not as a signifier of correctness but instead as a kind of obtuse defensiveness, nonetheless critics, memoirists, and even some fiction writers enthused with didactic purpose do occasionally adopt such tones. Narrators who enact didactic postures, too, often seem to chastise instead of reason, assume readerly agreement, and imply that if there is disagreement, the problem lies in the values and personalities of the readers, not in the writer’s stance or claims. I would offer examples, but so doing would actually comply with precisely the dynamic such tone sets in the first place: you are with us or against us. There is no middle ground. Critique of tone is the only way to intervene and yet to do so might be understood as an attack on substance instead of style, insofar as narrators convinced of their rectitude see no style other than the rationality of their exhortations. So, to illustrate, here is an example from more-or-less “neutral” terrain: Adelle Davis’s 1970 tome, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, dedicated to “The Perfection That Is You.” The tome’s overt

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philanthropy bespeaks its mission as well as already suggesting what we might expect as a tone of corrective beneficence. In an interesting turn, however, one of the elements of nutrition “culture” Davis addresses in the book’s introduction is the discourse and tone of health culture in general and its effects: An additional reason why people understandably shy away from nutrition is that there is a widespread “should-not” philosophy. For example, I once spoke to a certain “health” organization. Before I was introduced, the chairman ranted with astounding fury about “poison white sugar” killing people. Probably each person in the audience had eaten “poison white sugar”; yet most of them appeared to be alive. Had that been my introduction to nutrition, I would probably have felt a surge of nausea thereafter when the subject was mentioned. It would be more constructive to state that some foods have more to offer than others.13 Overtly addressing the problems of food rhetoric and sanctimonious tone, Davis not only points to the zealously hyperbolic claims of some nutrition advocates but also, through the descriptive rhetoric she deploys in pointing out these excesses, pits herself against them as an exception to practices of exaggerated (and inaccurate) rectitude. Davis describes this “chairman” as having “ranted with astounding fury,” and notes that the audience should have, as she “would,” “felt a surge of nausea thereafter when the subject was mentioned.” Inaccurate (actually being completely wrong) fanaticism produces nausea, the exact opposite of what nutrition advocates are going for. Davis suggests as a corrective that “it would be more constructive to state that some foods have more to offer than others.” As Davis contrasts this nauseating zeal with her more measured approach, we might expect that her tone would offer the reasonable constructiveness to which she appeals, even though she has just produced a paragraph whose tone has been at the very least righteous offense at the chairman’s inaccurate diatribe. Davis has deployed the “chairman”’s outrageous claim to distract us from her own scornful, outraged tone, at least in this passage, although her tone disguises itself as a bemused sarcasm that merely clothes the outrage we are all supposed to feel: “Probably each person in the audience had eaten ‘poison white sugar’; yet most of them appeared to be alive.” Perhaps this is the moment in which Davis can negotiate



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the constructive approach she suggests instead of the snide, critical tone she enacts in this paragraph. Is it possible that Davis will escape the single-minded righteous tone of the reform-minded discourse she critiques and engage in “constructive” discussion? Note, she uses the term “constructive” instead of, say, “reasonable.” One can perhaps harangue constructively. Let’s see. She concludes the second chapter of the book on the virtues of breakfast with the following paragraph: Maximum well-being and efficiency can and should be produced for every hour we are awake. Your meals can be planned to give efficiency when you need it most. For example, if you are on a swing shift, your meal highest in protein should be eaten before you go to work. The general rule, however, is to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.14 Pocked with “shoulds,” Davis’s advice rings with its own admonishing inflection. The “shoulds” are accompanied by the presumably more enabling “cans.” Together these modal auxiliaries map possibilities that “should” be deployed for “maximum wellbeing and efficiency,” the qualities that, though implied, must be desired by all of us. In addition, as throughout her extended sales pitch, Davis deploys a form of second-person address that simultaneously seems to personalize her dietary panegyric, include her audience as those she assumes to be equally interested in the protocols of right eating (which is reasonable insofar as the interested are those most likely to read the book), and forestall the emergence of any disagreement with the program. The “you” evokes a sense of dietary solidarity, a species of covert “we.” Enlightened by Davis’s exhortations, we all climb onto the righteating bandwagon, inspired to a better life. Davis ends her enabling exhortation by importing a class comparison: the good eater’s day should move from the regal to the impoverished; ending the day with a pauper-style meal is the ironic reversal to good fortune that should be sought by those who want to “eat right to keep fit.” In the book’s final section, “When Ability Becomes Responsibility,” Davis argues that those who practice proper nutrition have a responsibility to make sure that everyone else “eats right” as well, outlining various ways people with differing roles and responsibilities may deploy their knowledge to help others

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find proper nutrition. The “you” definitively becomes a “we.” Housewives can learn to cook well and teach others; healthy eaters might lead through their own shining examples; devotees can spread the word by working in school cafeterias; nutrition advocates can influence lawmakers to pass laws limiting the production of foods with large amounts of artificial ingredients. Eating right, in other words, is not limited only to one’s own weal. As she concludes, “Every person who has the ability to see our country’s need can help fill that need. It is a part of my creed—of my religion, if you like—that when you have the ability to help your fellow-man, that ability ceases to be merely an ability and becomes a responsibility. It is this responsibility which must be shouldered by the big people of America.”15 The “mode” of this final chapter inclines on her use of the auxiliary “can”; the section swarms with possibility. This enfranchisement, however, barely veils the “shoulds” that undergird her exhortation, “shoulds” that in this section transform into “musts.” “If our nation is to survive as a world leader, there is a big job that must be done by big people, the big people sometimes mistakenly called the little people, by uncommon men so wrongly called the common man.”16 Again appealing to the reversal of values she enacted at the beginning—“little” “common” “paupers” are really “big” and “uncommon”—these “big” people, who are, because they know proper nutrition, not really “big” in that they are overweight, but “big” in knowledge and character, are also “big” because they influence other people to eat right and keep fit. In setting up this binary (big vs. those who do not eat right) Davis leaves no rhetorical choice. It is we “big people” against them. Not only must we eat right, if we do so we must also hound other people into doing so. What began as “reason” has turned into sanctimony, depending on the underlying truth that resonates through the book’s “cans,” “shoulds,” and “musts”: Davis’s dietary plan is the right way, her insistent tone accompanying what turns into an evangelism. It is a truth universally ignored, finally, that those who think they have found the right way inevitably believe that it is also their prerogative to hound everyone else into believing the same way. What might have passed for “reason” gives way to fanaticism, a sanctimonious pressure that ceases to hear reason at all, clothing itself instead in the “shoulds” and “musts” that intone “truth,” and outstrip argument into a most obvious desire for power and control.



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We Wag Our Fingers in Righteous Objurgation To the horror of technophobes, I like to say that if we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be. I mean that as a challenge, not as an admission of impending defeat. Every class should be an opportunity to do that which no screen can do— including offering students the opportunity to understand, create with, and also critique all that is going on in the background of our screens. You teach students to be literate in a digital age by doing, by interacting, by evaluating technology—not by banning it in formal education, the one place where they should be learning the wisest ways to use it.17 As critics, we employ various rhetorical devices to help us make convincing arguments about readings, interpretations, textual histories, critical practices, and other such matters as occupy our professional lives. Rhetoric is not simply sets of devices for presenting arguments effectively; it also affords ways of controlling tone, which is as much a part of effective argument as facts, compelling deductions, or other argumentative strategies. We all know that effective argumentation avoids revealing too many of our assumptions, whether positive or negative, about the inclinations of our readers. Assuming their hostility impels us to be defensive, a tone that rings forth as imperious, dismissive, and often insecure. Assuming the readers’ agreement might instigate a tone of self-congratulation that resounds as smug and perhaps conceited. Including the readers via direct address is a rhetoric of implied inclusion, the mark of an assumption of some common ground. This direct address, as in Adele Davis’s exhortations, is performative in that it produces the feeling of group accord upon which it seems to rely. There is little room in this rhetorical enfolding for naysayers; the presumption of inclusion simultaneously locates those who disagree at the excluded and aberrant margins of the conversation. This means that it is doubly difficult to critique or push back against the argument the text is making. It is, in a way, a rhetorical form of bullying. Just as directly addressing the imagined “you’s” of a reading audience is at best a rhetorical tactic of attention and inclusion,

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so the deployment of a first-person singular, sometimes first-person plural, narrator as a rhetorical device also appears to fold readers in as somehow already in agreement or at least open to whatever argument the narrator is advancing. The covert adamancy of this inclusive rhetoric implicitly addresses and openly avoids all plaints and resistance as if already resolved, even as the essayist is strenuously working to make the case. The pose of this rhetorical first-person plural narrator pretends to include all readers as willing allies in whatever project, ideas, critique, and/or vision of the world the first-person singular narrator, now presented as a group representative, presents, while simultaneously suggesting that there are many (less enlightened readers) who disagree and who must be convinced of the right way. Seeming to have embraced the readers, the first-person plural narrator strategically not only appears to gather readers and narrator alike in a moment of solidarity but also, curiously, produces a tone of condescension and sanctimonious rectitude: If you do not agree with me, we all will see how backward and conservative you are. We typically associate this form of first-person inclusive rhetoric with either politics or religion, both forms of discourse whose task is convince audiences of the righteousness of their beliefs. But for some reason, the last twenty-five years’ emergence of linked algorithmic modes of transducing texts and images also inspires such passion among its converts, whose arguments (as mentioned earlier, e.g.) both produce and openly combat a contrived group of old-fashioned, stick-in-the mud conservatives who do not yet realize that the age of co-presence, direct address, and screen-free discussion is over. The zeal of “mimo-tech” converts (mimo in that algorithmic transduction devices imitate printed language and image in the pixels of electronic screens) shares in the excesses the use of first-person inclusive rhetorics often try to hide, which in turn suggests that believers in “new” technologies themselves are still a bit defensive, unconvinced, or otherwise insecure. The constant employment, too, of discourses of “community” reinforces this rhetorical ploy of producing the group such rhetorics of inclusion seem to address. The tonal effect of these evocations of concordant groups and community is to pre-forge a sense of accord around topics that are highly controversial, forestalling both objection and exception from the start, appearing to pull all readers in as if reading itself were an act of forward-thinking collusion.



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As Lisa Spiro, for example, notes at the opening of her essay, “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” “Even as the digital humanities (DH) is being hailed as the ‘next best thing,’ members of the DH community have been debating what counts as digital humanities and what does not, who is in and who is out, and whether DH is about making or theorizing, computation or communication, practice or politics.”18 The hailing of this “next best thing” occurs in passive voice. Presenting this hailing not only as simultaneously concurrent with but also as the effect of some unknown group of hailers is yet another rhetorical gesture toward large group unanimity that in opening a discussion of the sets of debates that define the “DH community” seems already to produce the “community” to which the essay refers. In addition, Spiro’s evocation of a series of three matters for debate among the “members of the DH community” continues to establish an imaginary set of addressees, while curiously limiting the scope of their disagreement. We all agree that DH is a good thing. Our issues now are what the character of this thing is. Assuming, thus, a community that may in fact not be one insofar as the adherents of “DH” may not even agree on what “DH” is, Spiro’s deployment of the notion of community enacts a preemptive tone that skips past the issues of DH’s value to what are really issues of what DH might be. Tonally, this seems friendly and open—except for the sleightof-hand passive voice “hailing” that commences the essay with a self-adulating tone about the given-ness of something that may well not be as established as it might like to think. If it were, why would one need to assert its hailing? Spiro’s essay’s opening aptly illustrates the moebius logic of inclusive rhetorics of “we,” insofar as arguments in the first-person singular/plural operate to include those whom they have not yet convinced. Producing the illusion of an accepting plurality merely by speaking from what might appear to be such a group’s perspective, the contestative rhetoric around mimo-tech pre-produces the inclusive group it is also and at the same time trying to convince, as if that group were already there. This is not to say that there are not many adherents to mimo-tech, believers in the virtues of algorithmic transduction, and of course, corporate interests in marketing such platforms in higher education (especially insofar as such platforms are neither unbiased nor programmed to critique themselves). The rhetorical logic of narrator and tone in these discussions, however,

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seems to put the cart and horse together before they have been hitched. And the tone this produces is often preemptive, which instead of nurturing thought, redirects it past larger, more salient points of possible disagreement. The critic doth protest too much, methinks. The register of defensiveness composed by the over-hearty deployment of rhetorics of community always rings false. We know that hyperbolic claims of any sort produce tones with defensive harmonics, whose vague cacophony sounds the discord the text’s rhetorical inclusions try to stifle. The “we” the discourse claims is always striated with a lingering dissonance, which the first-person plural narrator amplifies instead of repressing. This produces not only the tone of enthusiastic aggression necessary to pull the implied, but still audiated dissidents in line, but also a dogmatism audiated, finally, as strident, overly forceful and insistent. And if we know anything, we know that the moment we insist on our own righteousness is the moment we will clash head on with those who oppose, the ones we have been trying to overwhelm in the first place. Deploying the second person, however, can also be even more insistent than Adele Davis’s instructive/inclusive address. It can also enact a bossy tone that tries to masquerade as instruction: “You teach students to be literate in a digital age by doing, by interacting, by evaluating technology—not by banning it in formal education, the one place where they should be learning the wisest ways to use it.”19 Cathy Davidson deploys this declarative, what is actually nearly a command, after appealing to the “we” of the professoriate: “To the horror of technophobes, I like to say that if we profs can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be. I mean that as a challenge, not as an admission of impending defeat.” Overtly challenging those “phobes” among “we,” Davidson speaks as if from the “we” of “profs,” even though that “we,” as she obliquely admits in the sentence’s opening prepositional phrase, includes those very same “technophobes.” With that opening prepositional phrase, Davidson sets the terms of what is really a battle, beginning by deftly characterizing the “technophobes,” those others who comprise and yet seem not to be keeping up with the cutting-edge of “we profs,” as evincing “horror,” (and there is nothing more irrational than the overreaction of “horror”) at what might just as easily be perceived



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as the “horror” of Davidson’s rhetorical incitement to integrate mimo-tech into classrooms as an essential aspect of literacy. “Horror” in this sentence forestalls the horror it acknowledges, locating those who might disagree with her following declaration in the category of those who are phobic, that is, unreasonably fearful of mimo-tech. (I would note here that “technology,” a term that has come to stand for mimo-tech, also includes forks.) By aligning those in whose considered opinion mimo-tech invades, interrupts, derails, and preoccupies students in class without really adding anything to their intellectual portfolio with the “phobic” (and who among “we” hasn’t had those devoted Facebook fans pounding away on their keyboards, absent in an imaginary space, while life—and the class—pass them by?), Davidson locates her perverse declaration of mimo-tech inclusion in the context of what the sentence poses as a counterintuitive gambit—the inclusion of the interruptive process as itself an object of study, at least the study of its appropriate deployment. Decoying with “horror,” Davidson actually suggests a very different kind of horror from the one she initially displaces onto those who might disagree: the “horror” of tools themselves turning into the object of study, the horror of the evacuative loop such an emplacement produces, a transformation she occults by foregrounding the imaginary objections of phobic extremists. As in the scenario she proposes, substance and interaction evaporate in a frantic evasion of phobia, in the presumably stalwart act of facing mimo-tech directly, which, sadly and paradoxically, evokes precisely the horror those technophobes have: the fear of the disappearance of substance altogether. The tone enacted by evocations of group membership—of “community” (a term deployed constantly by most of the newly corporatized aspects of university programming)—is a rhetorical ploy whose primary purpose is to produce a deceptive tone of accord as the foundation for further pronouncements of more compromised participation in the fiction of the community which is more evoked than actually operating. This evocation of community automatically performs a chastising environment for those who disagree; in the very tone of evoked community resides the aggressive castigation of those who do not accept its terms. That this occurs in relation to the emergence of mimo-tech applications suggests that perhaps there is some profound doubt about their ultimate value, a dubiousness that must be cloaked by barely hidden moves to

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cast out and characterize dissenters as irrational. In whose interest does this tone merge? The wagging finger is always on one side of the false binary it has created, dismissive of discord, bullying in its reductions of terms, and entranced by its own imaginary power. But there are other, more felicitous tones produced by using the first-person plural.

13 We-tone

How often when we read do we imagine that we are, in fact, the sole recipients of the telling, at least at the moment we are reading? Or, do we see ourselves as one in a crowd of readers who are also in the process of reading or who have read this text? This second option is likely in texts assigned for classes, where there clearly is some group investment in a particular text or in non-fiction texts, commentaries, and arguments whose addressees are by definition, interested groups, even if the members of these groups are vague, scattered, or distant. This recipient “we” is occasionally at odds with the sense fictional texts often offer of a narrator confiding, its audience single, as in a conversation or even a confession. Some texts perform this confidential tone overtly by describing imagined scenarios of telling, as in Ford Maddox Ford’s The Good Soldier or Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.1 Some seem to make no overt tonal gesture toward either lone readers or those in a group, although subtle signs (such as the attention span required for lengthy descriptions) imply single readers who may often pause, look elsewhere, linger over a word or phrase or interrupt their reading as Roland Barthes suggests in The Pleasure of the Text.2 In the end, what difference does it make whether a text’s tone audiates as if to a single reader or to many readers together? Or both? Although, like the framed narrator, Marlow, in Heart of Darkness, a narrator may be staged recounting a narrative to a listening group, most print narratives operate with some co-equal plane between a narrator and a single reader, even if the telling evinces the power disparities intrinsic to humility, irony, or chastisement. At public readings where authors have been invited to read their writing to audiences, the narrator-reader relation turns into a speaker-auditor

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relation where functions that are separate, such as the author and the narrator, inevitably and misleadingly conflate, while the readersturned-auditors become a self-defining public willingly subject to the reading (unless some walk out). While reading solo may be a private encounter, the scenario of reader and listeners, guru and followers staged in public readings inevitably shifts the dynamics of text and readers, even in relation to the same text. Perhaps this is because public declamation by a single voice delimits the processes of readerly audiation to a single interpretation. Perhaps the very staging of public readings defines the relations between texts and readers as a performance of teller and recipient, over-enacting the subtle nuances of a text’s tonal shifts with the organizational geographies of public presentation. Many of us are accustomed to receiving texts as a group, but this reception changes the relation between reader and text from a reader’s active engagement to a listener’s passive reception. Singular readers are active; listeners in a group are passive, though they may well receive cues and hints from the group itself, as even within a listening group, members do not receive the text in the same way. What would the effect be, however, if there were a text with a plural narrator? Does a plural narrator have a singular tone? What dynamics between this group and individual readers might ensue?

Group Dynamics Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground before they opened it.3 Located in the culminating fifth part of William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” these two sentences enact the transition between the story’s description of Miss Emily’s funeral as the occasion for its aged attendees’ memories of the past and the actual forcing of the door to the long-closed room in Miss Emily’s house. The two sentences also mark a shift in narrator from first-person plural to third person, a barely perceptible move, but one that in tracing the shift between Emily’s past and a future, finds what they didn’t want

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to know. In the first sentence “already we knew.” In the second, “they waited.” In the first sentence the verb “knew” is simple past tense; the past perfect “had seen” appears in the subordinate clause, and “would have to be” is a future-past passive voice clause ending the sentence. The second sentence is all past-tense verbs. The shifts in verb tense in the first sentence are not simply the requisites of a subordinate clause that elaborates “that region above stairs.” The shifts also replay the story’s own persistent shifts among past tense, past perfect tense, and the realm of supposition represented in this sentence by the future-past passive-tense anticipation. Just like Miss Emily, the unopened room holds a mystery, the revelation of which “would have to be forced.”4 The tone of this paragraph seems matter-of-fact, a utility transitional paragraph stilling the waters before a final revelation. As it comes between one oddly lengthy, oddly lugubrious sentence and the next paragraphs’ revelations of abjection, the sentences’ shift from first-person plural to third-person effects a distancing, a literal removal from the scene along with the group of friends and neighbors to a point outside. In the sequence of paragraphs in the story’s fifth section, tone and tense map relations to time and knowledge. The story’s prominent use of a first-person plural narrator simultaneously personalizes the process of discovering Miss Emily’s secret, then distances the discovery as a communal rather than individual loss.5 The previous paragraph ends thusly: They held the funeral on the second day, with the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers, with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier and the ladies sibilant and macabre; and the very old men—some in their brushed confederate uniforms—on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.6

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Is this “they” then the “we” who narrates composed of the townspeople and funeral attendees? Are the readers among them or are readers a different “we” or maybe a “you?” Entering Miss Emily’s house after waiting “until Miss Emily was decently in the ground,” the “we” of the townspeople finally needed to break into a long-closed upstairs room. “For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. . . . Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.”7 Does this “we” derive from a community or does it produce it or the illusion thereof? In “A Rose for Emily,” the creation of community offers a counter to the mystery of the private Miss Emily. Non-communal, self-contained, clinging to an anachronistic aristocratic privilege, Miss Emily was anything but a part of the “we.” The narrative emphasizes this separation by deploying the first-person plural strategically, especially when it reveals Miss Emily’s secrets. But why exacerbate the feeling of group versus quirky citizen or “typical” denizens versus the leftovers from an era of more severe class stratification? Does doing so make the bizarre circumstance of her life even more horrific and inconceivable? Does it offer some sense of solace in the face of the extreme predilections of the lonely and abandoned? Does it provide some small feeling of retribution for past social injustices? Where does the “we” leave “us”?

Communal Delusions He fascinated us. He would never let doubt die. He overshadowed the ship. Invulnerable in his promise of speedy corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives. Had we been a miserable gang of wretched immortals, unhallowed alike by hope and fear, he could not have lorded it over us with a more pitiless assertion of his sublime privilege.8 Through him we were becoming highly humanized, tender, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his

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fear, sympathized with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions—as though we had been overcivilized and rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life. We had the air of being initiated in some infamous mysteries; we had the profound grimaces of conspirators, exchanged meaning glances, significant short words. We were inexpressibly vile and very much pleased with ourselves.9 The story of the voyage of the ship Narcissus from Bombay to London, Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus enacts the effects of a dying individual as his fate produces a communal “we” among the diverse sailors serving with him. The novella begins with a third-person omniscient narrator who describes the ship’s circumstances and personnel, picking out especially idiosyncratic individuals—the excitable Belfast; the ever-victimized, lazy, but aggressively combative Donkin; a large Finnish sailor, Wamibo; two Swedes; and Singleton, an old tar whose steadfast calm sets a standard for them all. Among these individuals is James Waite, “Jimmy,” a Caribbean black man, who from the start is visibly ill, incapacitated, but at the same time imperious and demanding. The sailors soon remove Jimmy to his own private cabin, where he hosts visitors from among the crew and generally holds court. The ship encounters a devastating storm; the ship and crew withstand it to survive as a more unified body. As the captain, bo’sun, and crew right the ship, they must also rescue Jimmy, whose cabin has been turned on its side. Jimmy is noticeably weaker, and the crew’s ability to deny the inevitable becomes more difficult to maintain. To the degree to which Jimmy shows signs of his impending mortality, the novella’s narrator shifts gradually from third-person to first-person plural, enacting the solidarity the crew has found in surviving the storm as well as in their relation to Jimmy, who has become the pathetic avatar of the dangers—and death—they have already faced.10 That Jimmy is also a black man, an otherness that has exacted either attentive sympathy or dismissive ire, offers another parameter that defines the establishment of a communal narrative voice operating in contradistinction to Jimmy’s simultaneous threats of sameness and difference. The tone of this third-person plural narrator is not, thus, produced by a simple opposition to Jimmy, but derives from the broad and abstract observations of an ambivalent group character

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the narrator offers. These general estimations of group temperament track the devolution of the ship’s socius as such. They seem to arrive from a distance, from a broad-scale observation of the crew’s transformations and behaviors as a group. In this scalar distance, the tone seems often to be astute and detached, tracking the shifts in feeling, outlook, and attitude with a tone of slight amazement or wonder. In one of the first shifts of narrator from what appears to be the detachment of a third-person observer—“No one went away. They waited with fascinated dread”11—to the evocation of a group comprised by its encounter with the figure who quickly comes to embody death, the appearance of “our” in the narration establishes that the narrator is both a singular observer and the spokesman for a group comprised of all of the sailors aboard the Narcissus who are not Jimmy. As emanating simultaneously from one voice and the group of sailors, the narrator’s tone is both affected by events and distanced from them, within and apart, offering observation and insight, event and analysis about the effects of the singular dying sailor and the group who watches him. Men stood around very still and with exasperated eyes. It was just what they had expected, and hated to hear, that idea of a stalking death, thrust at them many times a day like a boast and like a menace by this obnoxious nigger. He seemed to take pride in that death which, so far, had attended only upon the ease of his life; he was overbearing about it, as if no one else in the world had ever been intimate with such a companion; he paraded it unceasingly before us with an affectionate persistence that made its presence indubitable and at the same time incredible.12 One of the first appearances of the first-person plural, the emergence of the group/spokesman narrator out of the more matter-of-fact descriptions of what had functioned as a third-person omniscient narrator enacts the shift in the crew’s perception of itself produced not only by the demanding presence of James Waite on board the Narcissus but also by Waite’s evocations of the immediacy of mortality. Death merges voices into a voice that is simultaneously singular and plural. The tone of the voice(s) remains distanced and observant, however, as if recording a phenomenon instead of perhaps revealing the voice’s own apprehensions as such. Part of this effect

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of distance is produced by the distribution of cause and effect in the narrator’s descriptions, where the cause is the singular James Waite and the effects are felt by the crew as a recipient unit. The narrator observes what are essentially the effects of a certain passivity in the face of what Waite seems to represent for the group. In this sense agency and motivation derive entirely from the crew’s apprehension of Jimmy, the combined effects of his suffering, and the ways he symbolizes the inevitable. At the same time, the passage’s diction enacts an intrinsic ambivalence about both Jimmy and what he represents to the crew. This “death” “is thrust,” at them, a passage that begins in passive voice, but which quickly offers an illustrative comparison—“like a boast and like a menace”—that itself parses Jimmy’s ambivalent effect, but which also obviates this effect by quickly characterizing the death-dealer, Jimmy, as “this obnoxious nigger.” Jimmy himself plays out this same ambivalence, “taking pride in that death,” “which, so far, had attended only upon the ease of his life.” And about which he was “overbearing,” parading it “with an affectionate persistence,” whose continued ambivalence ends with the narrator’s characterization of Jimmy’s reminder of death “indubitable and at the same time incredible.”13 As the observer of a phenomenon of what is essentially group passivity, the narrator, whose pronomial self-characterizations represent a gradual transformation from third-person to firstperson singular (i.e., the spokesman is an individual speaking as an observer) combined with the first-person plural of the group itself, performs with an almost clinical tone, like that of an anthropologist observing folk rituals or aberrant group phenomena. The narrator offers substantial analyses of Jimmy’s effects on the crew (on the “us”’s) attitudes, self-conceptions, and relation to mortality, but only as a group ambivalently receiving the effects of Waite’s vociferous engagement with death, narrated as if from retrospective distance. “He overshadowed the ship. Invulnerable in his promise of speedy corruption he trampled on our self-respect, he demonstrated to us daily our want of moral courage; he tainted our lives.”14 General and summary, the narrator’s comments record as social phenomenon both the crew’s efforts to save the ship during the deadly storm and their more nuanced responses to Waite’s living reminder of mortality. In the face of Jimmy, the crew, merged into a single consciousness, is the recipient of the effects of a single man,

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marked by racial difference, but a man who has already separated himself from the group by his own insistence. This passive adversity, however, is followed by a more positive shift, characterized by identification instead of opposition, reflecting the series of emotional changes already wrought by the ship’s surviving the storm: Through him we were becoming highly humanized, tender, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety of his fear, sympathized with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions—as though we had been overcivilized and rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life. We had the air of being initiated in some infamous mysteries; we had the profound grimaces of conspirators, exchanged meaning glances, significant short words. We were inexpressibly vile and very much pleased with ourselves.15 The crew’s sympathy with Waite also solidifies their identity as a group—as “conspirators” who can communicate with “glances” and “significant short words.” The tone changes from the distanced tones of observing effects to the conspiratorial tone of a coherent if somehow smug socius. But this group, too, is riven with ambivalence. Simultaneously “humanized, tender, complex,” they are also “decadent.” In identifying with Waite— in “sympathiz[ing] with all his repulsions, shrinkings, evasions, delusions”—it is as if they had projected their fears of Waite back onto Waite, though at the same time acknowledging their own status as “overcivilized and rotten without any knowledge of the meaning of life.” They are both “inexpressibly vile” and “very much pleased with” themselves. While the novella seems to document the polar organization of a group in relation to an exceptional member who comes to represent difference (race, imperiousness) and sameness (the inevitability of mortality) simultaneously, the novella’s shift from third-person singular narration to the more ambivalent declarations of a firstperson singular/plural representative plays out the odd ambivalences of the entire set of relations. The one stands for the group; Waite and the narrator, apart and yet among, the latter documenting the former, the first brush with death surmounted, but the second,

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Waite’s, the exemplary demise of the singular man who refuses to be a scapegoat, while also being a scapegoat. And the combined tones of group and representative mix the observational, the pathos of ambivalent identification, a sense of inevitable tragedy, and the fear that binds it all.

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14 The Tone “We” Tell

In his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, Joseph Conrad parses the roles of “artist” and readers of fiction, envisioning the artist as a lonely individual and the recipients of the artist’s work as a larger group of receptive readers. “Fiction—if it aspires to be art—appeals to the temperament,” Conrad notes, “And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament whose subtle and restless powers endow passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional, the atmosphere of the place and time.” The singular artist becomes the perceptive and expressive renderer of truth as art—and art as truth. “It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colors, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence.”1 The multiple facets of existence and perception become a singular meaning in the hands or eye of the artist. “The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thinker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts—whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living.”2 Singular speakers address their audiences, individual readers become the plural recipients of insight, “I” becomes “we.”

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This is certainly enacted by the narrator of The Nigger of the Narcissus whose perceptions of group reaction and the effects of facing an avatar of mortality constitute a running commentary on one of the most fearsome aspects of human existence (in more-or-less Conradian terms). The perceiver describes the effects of a constant reminder of death on the group that surrounds him, identifies with him, and yet distinguishes the apprehending group themselves from him. The crew of the Narcissus functions as a group, which, apart from the narrator/spokesman, seems less aware of the patterns of their response than the narrator, who is simultaneously the “artist” (in Conrad’s terms) and one of them, singular and plural at once. The tone of this narrator is simultaneously wise to “temperament” in that he can “endow passing events with their true meaning” and wise because he also experiences what he relates. He is both distanced and entrenched, and because both third and first person, pretty nearly omniscient on all sides. What would be the tonal effect, however, of a truly multiple first-person narrator in a world where there is no perceived single “truth” or “meaning”? What would constitute the tone of this firstperson plural narrator whose narration offers multiple instead of single “truths,” manifold possibilities, trajectories, and fates?

There Is No Single We On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves.3 The first-person plural narrator of Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic is not the ambivalently singular and perceptive representative for group response as in The Nigger of the Narcissus, but enacts a first-person plural narrator that renders plurality and differences. It represents a more-or-less singular set of circumstances, but from the beginning it delineates the multiple trajectories of those within the group. This attention to differences performs tones that match the ethos of the multiple directions the narratives of immigrant brides may go, presenting all of these possibilities as a bundled group.



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As such, the first-person plural narrator challenges the predictable dynamic of narrative expected to comply with Aristotelian arcs or the protocols of comedy and tragedy to reveal the multiple coexisting trajectories that are implicit in every narrative, parsing them out, rendering a range of possibilities from triumph to tragedy and everything in between. The novel presents these experiences within the broad trajectory of “picture brides” who travel from Japan to marry Japanese men living in the United States before the Second World War. The novel is divided into seven sections that trace the broad trajectory of the brides’ fates in America: traveling from Japan to the United States by ship before the Second World War, facing their new husbands in their “First Night,” dealing with white Americans and assuming their place in California’s rural agriculture, having children, rearing children, facing the biases brought on by war with Japan, and being sent, finally, to prison camps. Each section, however, does not map group experience more than superficially, but instead offers the divergent responses and fates of a collection of very different women. While the brides who set out were “mostly virgins,” “some of us came from the city. . . . But many more of us came from the country.”4 “Some of us came from the mountains. . . . And some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives.”5 And even the brides’ experiences of these origins vary greatly: “Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away and now it was time for us, too, to move on.”6 Commencing, thus, with the dynamic combination of group and individual, commonality and divergence, The Buddha in the Attic establishes its tactic of group narration as differences within a broader trajectory, stories within stories, multiples, existing as the group narrator’s brief acknowledgment in its construction of the ultimate complexity of the story. The tone of this inmixture is, much like that of the narrator of The Nigger of the Narcissus, simultaneously distanced and observant while also sympathetic, ironic, and bitter by turns, depending on the way any given narrative bit goes. On the “Last Day,” for example, as Americans herd the Japanese to prison camps, “some of us left weeping. And some of us left singing. One of us left with her hand held over her mouth and hysterically laughing. A few of us left drunk. Others of us left quietly

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with our heads bowed, embarrassed and ashamed. There was an old man from Gilroy who left on a stretcher.”7 While all of them are leaving, the first-person plural narrator details individuals’ diverse reactions. This series of differences itself enacts prismatic shifts in tone that produce a varied and choral effect. “Weeping” combines grief and pity; singing in contrast becomes defiant and ironic. The evocation of hysterical laughter merges weeping and sighing in an observation of the insanity of it all. Inebriation follows and palliates the insanity, while shame offers a more humble and less rebellious response as well as the sense of how shameful the entire episode is for the imprisoned and the imprisoners alike. This series of responses is, thus, not simply a list of differences; it constructs a narrative dynamic that itself enacts in its astutely ordered provision of multiplicity both individual responses and a separate narrative trajectory of responses that plays out the group’s gradual modes of acceptance/rebellion in reaction to dubious policies inspired by war, fear, and racism. While offering differences, the differences themselves map the larger, more complex stages of response, shifting tone with every variation. What The Buddha in the Attic’s first-person plural narrator’s provisions of variation illustrates is the interdependence of narrative itself and tone. Not simply a matter of syntax, diction, and the persistence of personality or circumstance, tone derives as much from which of the many possible directions that narratives might take as it does from the subtleties of language. In the earlier passages, the syntax and diction remain constant—only the responsive actions differ. The first-person plural narrator, as in The Nigger of the Narcissus, operates simultaneously as a distanced observer and as a voice from within the diverse “us.” But while the narrator of The Nigger of the Narcissus shifts gradually from a third-person omniscient narrator entailing the individual quirks of a diverse array of sailors to a first-person plural narrator who characterizes the emotional reactions of a unified group and briefly back to third person, the first-person plural narrator of The Buddha in the Attic persists in the simultaneous distanced perspective and engaged immersion that ultimately shows the difference narrative’s infinite and always lurking implied possibilities makes to tone itself. The relation between tone and narrative’s multiple twists exists in the first-person plural narrator’s imaginary posture at the juncture of individual and group within the larger trajectory of the Japanese



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brides’ journey from Japan to the United States to maternity to an array of occupations to threat and finally imprisonment. The narrator’s tone does not alter perceptibly within these larger stages, remaining impersonal and descriptive—“The rumors began to reach us on the second day of war”8—but its tonal inflections do alter sentence by sentence as each phrase offers one of a range of narrative possibilities that arrive with each node of change, both positive and negative. Just as arranged marriages might turn out happily, they might also become demeaning or tragic: “They took us on our knees, while we clung to the bedpost and wept. They took us while concentrating fiercely on some mysterious spot on the wall that only they could see. They took us while murmuring ‘Thank you’ over and over again in a familiar Tohoku dialect that immediately set us at ease. He sounded just like my father.”9 The fact of consummation functions as a node that opens out into a number of possibilities, the rendition of each of which enacts a slightly different tone, reinforced in the earlier passage by the inclusion of a quoted postcoital remark. The group owns it all, and yet each possibility has its own feel, produced by the way the narrative itself turns in multiple directions. In the last section of the novel, “Disappearance,” the first-person group narrator changes groups from the Japanese brides to the townspeople who had previously coexisted with them. The fates of the Japanese are still multiple, but the end of their presence in town is unmistakable. The tone of this final section is less elastic and changeable as in the previous sections. Now that the Japanese have disappeared, the denizens feel their absence with sadness and regret: “All we know is that the Japanese are out there somewhere, in one place or another, and we shall; probably not meet them again in this world.”10 Still varied—“in one place or another”— the Japanese continue their combination of group and diversity, while the town that has lost them experiences only the absence of a people whose faces have begun “to blend and blur” in their minds. In this sense The Buddha in the Attic enacts finally a distinction between the resident Americans and the Japanese immigrants. While the Americans persist in quotidian predictability, the Japanese disappear along with their infinite variation. The first-person plural narrator continues its description of possibilities, but these are all supposition at this point, blended into a single fate.

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15 Tonal Dialogics

I said, “Tone derives from the illusion of speech as presented in and audiated from a printed text. Although quoted speech is actually enframed by a teller (even if the narrator appears only to present it), such quoted speech appears to offer some immediate experience of the speaker’s presumably unmediated tonality. Those who speak are how they speak.” Then I recalled that how they speak emerges in the subtle details of what they say. E. M. Forster premises his estimations of readerly types on dialogic examples, contrived, of course, but located in the personality each type’s commentary enacts in its tone. You said (let me blame this on you): “There are several modes of speech in printed texts: quoted commentary or dialogue, inscribed speech (as in diaries or letters), commentary to self offered by a character via a narrator constructed with the illusion of varying degrees of evident participation, framed first-person narration or dialogue quoted by other characters, and finally, first person narration itself insofar as the illusion of recounting a story enacts tones that redound to and characterize the teller.” I rejoined, “Some first person narrators narrate themselves; others focus on other characters and events. Both types enact a link between telling, speech, and tone.” “Okay, show me some examples,” you said, hoping, I suspect, to trap me. I gleaned that from the challenging tone of your proposition—your use of “okay,” which audiated as a command indicating some degree of dubiousness. Unless I was misreading you. Here is a passage from a short story: “We want two Anis del Toro.” “With water?”

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“Do you want it with water?” “I don’t know,” the girl said. “Is it good with water?” “It’s all right.” “You want them with water?” Asked the woman. “Yes, with water.” “It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down. “That’s the way with everything.” “Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.” “Oh, cut it out.” “You started it,” the girl said. “I was being amused. I was having a fine time.” “Well, let’s try and have a fine time.” All, right. I was trying. I said the mountains looked like white elephants. Wasn’t that bright?” “That was bright.” “I wanted to try this new drink. That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” “I guess so.”1 * * * “Ernest Hemingway’s story, ‘Hills Like White Elephants,’ fleshes out two characters through their dialogue. The characters have no names, but exist as ‘the girl’ and ‘the man.’ An asymmetrical pairing if you think about it. She’s a child; he’s an adult. Isn’t that always the way it goes when ‘masculinity’ is at stake?” “What makes you think that?” “In the passage I quoted, the text identifies only the ‘girl’s’ speech; what the man says is unmarked. The minimal interjection by a third person narrator has the effect of foregrounding the girl’s speech, as if it is somehow more extreme, more emotional, or more symptomatic of some dysfunction in the relationship, while ‘the man’ is a reactor with the power to challenge ‘the girl.’ He wants to keep the ‘girl’ in line.” “Oh cut it out. Aren’t you getting that sense from what she says?” You ask. “Yes and no. Several times the narrator interrupts the girl’s speech with notations that she is speaking. The interruptions



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actually redound to the tone of the narrator itself as a bit condescending to the girl, a tendency we may link to the man as recipient and respondent to her speech. She is interruptible, while the man is calm and collected—and not even linked to what he says.” “So what tone does the girl have based on what she says?” “At first she seems merely naive, not knowing whether she wants her drink with water or not, but after she tastes the drink and comments on its tasting like ‘licorice,’ her subsequent comments suggest a measure of disappointment and defensiveness.” “Based on what?” “Based on her evocations and comparisons with a past— ‘especially all of the things you have waited so long for,’ and ‘I was being amused,’ and ‘I was having a fine time.’ She begins to sound defensive, as if the man is accusing her of being dissatisfied or grumpy. She is protesting that she has, in fact, been evincing an open mind and a spirit of enjoyment.” “What, then, is the tone of the man?” “Interrogative. Feigned patience which disguises disgust or a little snideness. A sense of control indicated by the brevity of his remarks.” “But don’t you get that sense about the man from reading the girl’s comments as already defensive?” “Yes, but the two work together. The tone of the man depends on the tone of the girl and vice versa. His dialogue seems to underrespond, to be apart from the conversation such as it is. His tone, though apparently mild and unassertive, audiates as exaggerated patience covering impatience in the context of what the girl says, which sounds as if it is a continuation of some past argument.” “How do you get that?” “From his nearly monosyllabic, and/or corrective (‘Well, let’s try and have a fine time’), and/or pallidly snide (‘That’s the way with everything’; ‘That was bright’) responses to her.” “So he also seems older, more experienced. Patient but weary of her? In tone?” “That’s what I would say.” “And she is slightly bitter, disappointed?” “Tonally, yes.”2 “Could you discern tone from a single line?”

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“Sometimes.” “For example?” “‘Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ‘see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.’”3 “But that has some narratorial description in it that characterizes the speaker’s attitude.” “Yes, but the speech itself intones the same attitude.” “Which is . . . ?” “Fearful self-righteousness, the insistence of someone not in control of the situation, a feeling of powerlessness, and perhaps even a feeling of inevitability.” “But don’t you get that from her ‘standing with one hand on her thin hip?’” “It’s like drama,” I said patiently. “Stage directions reinforce the dialogue, not the other way around.” “You would still lose the school-marmy, scolding tone, maybe.” “Maybe. But you would still have the sense of panic and fear. And also that she is from the south.” “Aloose?” “Aloose.” “Flannery O’Connor?” “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” * * * “Are you tired of this? “No.” “Two more?” “Two more.” “Okay: what is the tone of this: ‘Nous autres américains, we Americans,’ he said, ‘like change. It is at once our weakness and our strength.’”4 “Pretentious.”



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“Pretentious. How do you know?” “For one thing the French, then, worse, the translation.” “His use of ‘we’?” “And the adjudicative quality of the second sentence.” “But isn’t there some context? Isn’t he talking to a foreigner? And obviously trying to impress whomever.” “Which always suggests some sense of inferiority for which he is also trying to compensate. Who is it?” “It is a character, Eliot Templeton, whom the first person narrator of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge is presenting precisely as a transatlantic snob.” “Well, the speech audiates that.” “Voila!” “Is it more difficult to audiate the tone of, say, British speech if one is American?” “You can easily audiate social class from either British or American dialogue.” “Seriously? (pause) Okay, show me.” “Ready?” “Okay.” “I’ll quote a line and you guess class and nationality.” “Shoot.” “Why thank you very much, I’d adore to.” “Upper class, sophisticate.” “On what basis?” “‘Adore to.’ Who says that?” “Okay, right. What nationality?” “British?” “Based on?” “Using the word adore? Americans tend not to use that word in that kind of context.” “Nope.” “Okay, then, upper class American—and female.” “Why female?” “Because what other kind of American would ever say ‘adore’? Also educated, if not upper class.” “Okay, pretty good.” “Who was it?” “An unnamed character in Dorothy Parker’s ‘The Waltz.’”5 “Next.”

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“I aim to. I don’t figure to stay in a country among people who . . .” “That’s it? (Pause). American south, but not a wealthy southerner.” “Correct. What was the hint?” “‘Aim to,’ and ‘figure.’ Lower class for the same reason. What was that from? O’Connor?” “No. William Faulkner’s ‘Barn Burning.’”6 “A resentful guy, too.” “How do you know it’s a guy?” “Too assertive.” “The Grandmother in ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’ was pretty assertive.” “Yes, but her assertion was scoldy and over-assertive. (Pause). Okay, another.” “How yuh, Mistah Joe? Aw, Ah don wanna buy nothing. Ah just wanted see ef yuhd lemme look at tha catlog erwhile.”7 “Well, if you say it like that, it already gives it away.” “That’s the way it is written.” “In dialect? Okay, African-American, poor, rural or southern.” “What is the clue?” “Isn’t it obvious? And probably in this case what dialect indicates is probably a major element of the point of the story. What is the text?” “Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man.’”8 “Give me another.” “What about, ‘I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet’?”9 “Oh come on. That’s a little brief, isn’t it?” “But you could still tell.” “Upper class? British?” “Based on what?” I inquired. “The use of should, which tends to be British. And requesting to see someone by using the person’s last name. And the name seems to be French. The request seems a little peremptory.” “Can’t you just hear it? (Imitating a British accent) ‘I should like to see Mr. Dubonnet.’” “Can you say it in American?” You challenged. “Americans don’t use ‘should’ that way.” “Okay, enough. You have proved your point.” “Not quite. Was the speaker a male or a female?” “That I can’t tell.” (Pause)



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“Male.” “Upper class?” “Indeed.” “What text?” “Got a guess?” “Something cosmopolitan. Waugh? Woolf?” “Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway. The character Hugh Whitbread.” “Okay, one more example.” “This is dialogue that not only reveals class and nation, but also hints at an actual historical figure.” “Wouldn’t it make a difference whether you know who that is?” “Let’s try: ‘Looks like a tart. How do you do, my dear, come in. We’re just thinking of having a little drink. You know everyone here, of course, don’t you? That’s the King with the beard . . . No, deary, the King of Ruritania. You didn’t mind my taking you for a tart, did you, dear? You look so like one, got up like that. Of course, I can see you aren’t now.’”10 “Hmm. British?” “Yes.” “A person of some privilege?” “Based on . . .” “Offering guests a drink, then calling the addressee a ‘tart,’ then basically excusing the insult by insulting the person’s appearance.” “So you might characterize the speaker as either upper class or uppity?” “More uppity, but in a position to be so.” “Why?” “Because she uses the word ‘tart.’” “Why do you say ‘she’?” “Because the character says ‘deary,” and talks to the other woman in a familiar way that would not come from a male.” “So this is possibly a lower class woman who is occupying the position of host?” “Possibly.” “Which would suggest that she is out of her environment, yet also in it?” “Maybe. Maybe she is a high-classed prostitute, dealing with Kings, etc. If she were really a wealthy British person, she would have a servant serving the drinks.”

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“So she is a hybrid hostess/servant/uppity British woman?” “I would say. I would also say that whatever text this is from, it is a comedy.” “Why?” “Because a non-comic text would not have an exchange like this, nor a character like that. What’s it from?” “Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. It is the character Lottie Crump, the proprietress of ‘Shepheard’s Hotel, Dover Street.’ ‘She is a fine figure of a woman, singularly unscathed by any sort of misfortune and superbly oblivious of those changes in the social order which agitate the more observant grandes dames of her period. When the war broke out she took down the signed portrait of the Kaiser and, with some solemnity, hung it in the men-servants’ lavatory; it was her one combative action . . .’”11 “So I was pretty much right.” “Yep. The one thing about this character is that she is based on an actual hotel proprietress named Rosa Lewis, who also had a hotel, the Cavendish Hotel, Duke Street, and who also hung the Kaiser’s portrait in the male servants’ lavatory.” “But you would have to know that to know that.” “It just makes the tone doubly resound.” “Meaning?” “That even as you can glean many aspects of characters from the tone of their speech, there is also a species of tonal reverberation that comes from interactions with other characters, the direction of the narrative, other aspects of context one may know or assume, and in this case, if one knows about Rosa Lewis, the tone picks up already a bundle of associations.” “So dialogue is just the beginning.” “Yep.”

16 Inscribing Tone

Writing Resolution In narratives poised as fictional diaries, written language takes the place of dialogue as an inscribed speech that intones character. In diaries penned by historical figures, such as Anne Frank or Anaïs Nin, there is always the question of whether or how much the diary writer consciously or unconsciously fashioned her voice so as to create a more attractive personality or sway a reader other than herself. Though presumably private, “real” diaries always threaten to become public (as in the cases of Frank and Nin). Fake diaries, on the other hand, are designed to produce the illusion that what they are fabricating is the intimate, private portrait of a character recounted in the first person by the character to her or himself. The tone of this presumably audienceless text offers “evidence” of authentic and unmediated character—an intrinsic aspect of which is the desire to write a diary in the first place. When I found that I was a prisoner a sort of wild feeling came over me. I rushed up and down the stairs, trying every door and peering out of every window I could find; but after a little the conviction of my helplessness overpowered all other feelings. When I look back after a few hours I think I must have been mad for that time, for I behaved much like a rat does in a trap. When, however, the conviction had come to me that I was helpless I sat down quietly—as quietly as I have ever done anything in my life—and began to think over what was best to

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be done. I am thinking still, and as yet have come to no definite conclusion.1 This passage in Jonathan Harker’s journal from Bram Stoker’s Dracula traces the writer/speaker’s trajectory as he recognizes, panics, and then begins to work through his imprisonment in Count Dracula’s castle. The verb tenses of the passage map a past line of responses that end up in the present of the journal’s inscription. Hence, the journal represents Harker’s retrospective reconsideration of a recent, panicked past. Unafraid to confess what might be read as his weakness upon the discovery of his entrapment, Harker comes clean about his fear. But he only does so once he has conquered it. This suggests not only that the writing of the journal is sign of his self-mastery but also that the writing itself might be a form of mastery. The inscription represents Harker’s having regained his self-control; it is the writing of a character who has experienced and surmounted fear, who has faced (doubly) “the conviction” of “helplessness” and has, as of his writing, begun to think constructively. The writing, thus, doubly reflects the situation, both recording and itself enacting a resolve, a temporary bravado that emerges from (and also produces) the speaker’s tone. Even when he is recounting his moments of trepidation, the journal’s tone is calm, collected, reflecting the status of the speaker who is settled and sufficiently resolute to write. The journal is testament to the character who can inscribe what he has written as testament, circling around and enwrapping fear in the calmative of prose. At the same time, Harker is able to confess his weakness. Insofar as such confessions might also aid in gaining mastery, he can present himself to himself not only as someone with enough character to overcome a nightmarish imprisonment that has rendered him temporarily insane but also as someone brave enough to reveal his incipient weakness. This acknowledgment renders Harker not only vulnerable and human but also a character with character. He is a man who enacts the processes that make him a man.

Perpetuated Perversity In writing to self, diaries double the tonal enaction of a character by describing and describe by doubling the character of the character

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who writes. They are like mirrors reflecting in mirrors, which goes a long way toward characterizing the comic tone of the diarist, Bridget Jones of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. 10 p.m. Ugh. Perpetua, slightly senior and therefore thinking she is in charge of me, was at her most obnoxious and bossy, going on and on to the point of utter boredom about the latest halfmillion-pound property she is planning to buy with her rich-butoverbred boyfriend, Hugo: “Yars, yars, well it is north-facing but they’ve done something frightfully clever with the light.” I looked at her wistfully, her vast, bulbous bottom swathed in a tight red skirt with a bizarre three-quarter-length striped waistcoat strapped across it. What a blessing to be born with such Sloaney arrogance. Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace and not give it a thought. How many hours, months, years, have I spent worrying about weight while Perpetua has been happily looking for lamps with porcelain cats as bases around the Fulham Road? She is missing out on a source of happiness, anyway. It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth or power but the pursuit of attainable goals and what is a diet if not that? On way home in end-of-Christmas denial I bought a packet of cut-price chocolate tree decorations and a L3.69 bottle of sparkling wine from Norway, Pakistan or similar. I guzzled them by the light of the Christmas tree, together with a couple of mince pies, the last of the Christmas cake and some stilton, while watching Eastenders, imagining it was a Christmas special. Now, though, I feel ashamed and repulsive. I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body. Never mind. Sometimes you have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order to emerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland as a purged and beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer figure. Tomorrow new Spartan health and beauty regime will begin.2 Enacting perpetual self-reversals, Bridget’s diar(et)ic inscriptions play on perverse commentary that characterizes Bridget as simultaneously funny and mildly self-destructive because of the perverse relation between what Bridget says and what she says she does. Poised on several series of contradictions, the entry for the night of January 3 has Bridget comparing herself to an overweight rich girl, then gorging herself as if simultaneously to placate her

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own feelings of inferiority, to ensure that she stays in her middling position, and to offer a vague imitation of her nemesis, Perpetua. Bridget’s self-contradictions—castigating Perpetua, then pigging out in Rabelaisian fashion (two Mince pies?!?)—contrast with yet another contradiction, as Bridget simultaneously produces the need for and proposes the notion of the “attainable goal”—weight loss— through which she might make herself happy. But not really. Her burlesquing Perpetua is ambivalent, both a sharp satire (“Perpetua could be the size of a Renault Espace”) and vaguely envious (“How many hours, months, years, have I spent worrying about weight while Perpetua has been happily looking for lamps with porcelain cats as bases around the Fulham Road?”). Casting Perpetua as insensitively wealthy and trivial (“lamps with porcelain cats”?), Bridget produces a version of herself as both envious and superior, the one with less money who can nonetheless see the insignificance of those who have money to waste and who are, in addition, fat and unattractive—looking like small French automobiles and sporting “bulbous bottoms” and “bizarre three-quarter-length striped waistcoats.” Bad taste in Bridget’s world comes with wealth, except when Bridget herself buys reduced-price, post-Christmas tree-decoration chocolates, eats them all, washing them down with cheap bubbly (“from Norway, Pakistan or similar”), “Christmas cake and some stilton,” while watching a British soap opera. Bridget, then, justifies her excessive response to being bullied by a fat, rich girl (or simply her pleasurable after-work activity, itself either incited or alibied or both by thoughts of Perpetua) as producing the dilemma whose solution will afford her true happiness. Unlike Perpetua, Bridget does know the source of “true happiness,” which is “the pursuit of attainable goals,” and, as she further justifies the binge she was about to have (which in its recounting is both prospective and retrospective), by planning to go on a diet. “What is a diet if not that?”—if not an “attainable goal”? In this way, Bridget has engineered a strategy by which she can feel superior to Perpetua, while having her cake, pie, chocolate and cheap bubbly and eating it, too. If Bridget cannot have porcelain-cat-based lamps, then she can have the “true happiness” that comes with achieving real goals, goals which Bridget produces in her travesty launchpad of a post-Christmas Christmas feast.3 Bridget’s feast is, thus, both one response to her presumptive, corpulent, and insensitive co-worker and compensation for having

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such an unfairly hearty and well-off co-worker in the first place, especially with the name “Perpetua.” Bridget solaces herself with cathartic confessions of self-disgust: “I feel ashamed and repulsive. I can actually feel the fat splurging out from my body.” But she then relieves her self-disgust by returning to the solution she had previously contrived for her envy and resentment of Perpetua: a successful diet. Even if Bridget now feels even more disgusting, her Perpetua-like condition sets out the “goal” whose attainment will afford her “true happiness.” “Sometimes,” she writes, “you have to sink to a nadir of toxic fat envelopment in order to emerge, phoenix-like, from the chemical wasteland as a purged and beautiful Michelle Pfeiffer figure.” From Perpetua to Pfeiffer, Bridget’s sinking to a “nadir” of “toxic” blubber establishes a significant task: “Tomorrow new Spartan health and beauty regime will begin.” Bridget’s discourse linking fat with toxicity, referring to her post-pig-out condition as a “nadir,” transforms her defensive self-indulgence into a grander cataclysm more in line with contemporaneous environmental conditions. Not only elevating Bridget’s battle to an epic scale, this ecological imagery also locates her struggle as one in sophisticated tune with the sneaky but crucial effects of the self-indulgences that plague the world. Bridget’s tone, thus, takes on a patina of clinical ecology— an informed understanding of the sophisticated technologies of septic over-indulgence that spell world doom. A tone of subtle self-satire, Bridget’s self-inscriptions enact her bravado as in tune with the times, as well as humorous, admirable, pitiable— and most important—enact a tone with which many women can identify. Bridget’s performance of self (both pitiable and potentially conquering) offers multiple layers of connection; she has both strength and weakness, resolve and impossibly hyperbolic ambition, the ability to pierce superficiality and a tendency simultaneously to resent and covet social advantage. Her writing signals an everyday women, but one who is au courant, self-critical, and subject to the same weaknesses as everyone else, signaled ironically by her rich co-worker’s corpulence. But recall: Bridget’s writing is poised as a diary. Her wit is a form of self-comfort, a way of putting her foes in place with words offered to herself. It is, thus, a self-consoling project that seems to perform Bridget to herself so she can stay herself. The diary is a dose of self to self.

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Bridget cheers herself up with herself even when she is depressed. Her commentary is clever; the writing offers consolation insofar as she can reduce her antagonists (including herself) to a series of self-contradictory farces, perverse burlesques, and self-revealing contradictions. This tactic of self-contradiction also results in a more broadly comedic tone that festoons Bridget’s writing’s underlying sadness, disgust, or disappointment with a veneer of playfulness, parodic disrespect and even self-abnegating cultural jokes. Bridget is a brave girl who hides her feelings of inadequacy in clever wit. After all, Bridget does not have (and appears to disdain) a “richbut-overbred boyfriend” with a name like “Hugo,” but her weightloss ambitions suggest that, like many young women, she does want a boyfriend, single as she may be at the moment. So Bridget’s tone finally evinces a distant, but subtending longing to be valued for more than, as in the case of Perpetua, her money. Diary intones character, in both senses of the word.

“I Seem to Be Thinking Practically All of the Time” March 16th: A gentleman friend and I were dining at the Ritz last evening and he said that if I took a pencil and a paper and put down all of my thoughts it would make a book. This almost made me smile as what it would really make would be a whole row of encyclopedias. I mean I seem to be thinking practically all of the time. I mean it is my favorite recreation and sometimes I sit for hours and do not seem to do anything but think.4 The first lines of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes account from the start for the coming-into-being of the diary text we are reading. But not quite. Beginning with the genesis of some sort of text—“book”? “Whole row of encyclopedias?”—comprised of the writer’s “thoughts,” the suggestion from the “gentleman friend” is already in diary form, marked by a date in traditional diary fashion. Writing her thoughts begins with a conversation about writing her thoughts, as voluminous as they promise to be, inscribing the reinscription of the origins of the inscription.

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But not of the source of the abundant thoughts that threaten to fill tomes nor of the character of the writer who seems “to be thinking practically all of the time,” a declaration that intones the diary writer as naive, as a neophyte who, to the point when she begins to write, seems unaware that she was thinking. The passage itself is circular, starting with its start—“thoughts”—and ending where it began with the writer thinking. The diary, hence, would seem to be a compendium of thoughts from a thinker thinking about thoughts. Insofar as this perpetuated thinking enacts a dynamic of self-reflexive thought, it also enacts a character whose meditations focus on her own meditations—someone who is selfinvolved, but naively so. The writer’s mode of expression has no sophistication; it performs an almost childlike marveling in the step-by-step recognition of the potential relation between thoughts and inscription. The passage’s impression of the naiveté of its writer derives as well from the passage’s repetition of the phrase, “I mean,” which instead of clarifying or specifying the character of the writer’s thoughts, simply repeats in several different ways her recognition of the idea that she thinks. The sentences are cumulative, each offering an additional detail, as if the writer cannot organize her thoughts into a single expression. “Paper and pencil,” the gentleman friend suggests, would make “a book,” which, the writer notes, is a bit “silly,” since she thinks so much her thoughts would make an “encyclopedia,” which is because she is “thinking practically all the time.” It is her “favorite recreation.” Locating thinking as something akin to a hobby, the writer’s treatment of the idea of thought offers the cast of someone perhaps too young, too unsophisticated, or too inexperienced to be out with a “gentleman friend.” Or perhaps, the diary enacts a hick innocence to disguise the fact that she knows exactly what she is doing with these men. Or, possibly expressions in the diary that might audiate as childlike wonder are something more like stupidity. Treating thinking as if it is a hobby, an activity like reading or listening to the radio, the passage enacts a writer whose compositional capabilities may be somewhat limited to the point that the ways she expresses ideas end up as travesties, both of the ideas and of herself. The very idea that this “thinker” should write down her ideas also indirectly audiates as the gentleman’s attempt to woo her through complements that are, as the quality of the writing suggests, so far

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off that the suggestion that she write down her thoughts comes across as the attempt to flatter that it is. And not only that, flattering the writer’s intellectual capacity seems either to cast doubt upon the gentleman’s judgment or to indicate that he truly is a clever wooer, finding his dinner companion’s weak spot and going for it. The writer’s thought processes are so stumbling that she can’t even discern that he is shamelessly and glibly ingratiating himself. That this is the case becomes apparent a few lines later: “So this gentleman said a girl with brains ought to do something else with them besides think. And he said he ought to know brains when he sees them, because he is in the senate and he spends quite a great deal of time in Washington, D.C., and when he comes into contract with brains he always notices it.”5 Thus almost overtly substituting “brains” for looks, the gentleman wooer’s speech, as the writer, again, naively records it, offers a satirical commentary on the brain power of Washington politicians, among whom “brains” seem to be so rare that he notices when they are there. Unless, of course, he means all along something other than brains which is much more likely to be in short supply in the senate. The writer’s malapropic use of “contract” in place of “contact” offers another tonal cue to personality; she is endeavoring to reach beyond her capabilities, to pretend she is more sophisticated and educated than she is. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that the gentleman is using crass flattery to achieve some goal other than mere friendship. As she describes it: So it might have all blown over but this morning he sent me a book. And so when my maid brought it to me, I said to her, “Well, Lulu, here is another book and we have not read half the ones we have got yet.” But when I opened it and saw that it was all blank I remembered what my gentleman acquaintance said, and so then I realized that it was a diary. So here I am writing a book instead of reading one.6 Again circling back to the moment of its origin, the diary produces the persona of a writer who is in the process of completing the narrative of the diary’s inception. But that the diary describes the “gentleman acquaintance” as punctuating his already ludicrous pickup techniques with the proffer of a writing surface makes it clear that this “gentleman” is more than a mere friend.

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Through this description, the writer maintains her naiveté tonally, as a willed ignorance of the gentleman’s real goal indicated by her childlike writing, as perhaps a delicate avoidance of the character of the relationship, as the enactment of her real failure to perceive his motives, or as a clever distraction from his real motivations. The tone of this initial passage, then, audiates a writer/character who is simultaneously naive and uneducated (e.g., she doesn’t read books, uses malapropisms, writes like a child) and a woman of a certain kind of world, where appeals to brains over beauty can work as pickup lines (probably because she often gets the beauty approach). At the same time, her malapropisms themselves perform a comic commentary, in this case the salient difference in Washington, D.C., between “contacts” and “contracts,” the first suggesting the realities of political life, the second a shadier world of influence peddling and pay-offs as well as her swain’s commentary on the paucity of beauty among politicians, if brains, as the passage also suggests, have always really meant beauty. That the “gentleman acquaintance” is himself a politician also comments on the hypocritical character of those who might preach virtue from public pulpits. All of this derives from the tone of the diary writer’s naive pose which signals in our audiation of her writing that her expressions actually mean more than she may (or may not) think she is saying, whether or not she knows what she is doing. The construction of character via the tone of her writing is, in this instance, remarkably complex, its tones signaling simultaneously the writer’s apparent innocence and an equally sagacious discretion, which finally raises the question of how we read her. Do we know more than she does by reading the symptoms of her expressive infelicities? Is she really more clever than her writing suggests and is only feigning her guilelessness? Can we audiate both at the same time, our sense of cleverness an effect of her apparent innocence, or does her tone license us to be like the “gentleman acquaintance,” taking advantage of her gullibility for our own pleasure? The diary enacts two tones at once: naiveté and the irony of another commenting voice, resonating from the novel’s narrator, who also echoes the cynical commentary of friend, Dorothy. In the end, diarists are what they sound like they are, as their tones ring in a multiple, self-contradictory fashion, inviting a

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reading beyond the obvious, catalyzing an analysis of the writer’s motives and unconscious desires. This tonal resonance seduces readers by suggesting that the reader may perceive more about the diarist than the diarist him- or herself. Reader becomes analyst. Apparent confession sparks a tonal reading between the lines.

17 Moebius Tone

Diaries tend to produce tonally what scrivening characters reaffirm about themselves. Harker is calm because he says he is calm; not only does he (re)produce his calm by describing it and he can only describe it because he is calm. He describes the calm to continue to produce it. Bridget Jones’s hopeful tone reprises the process of defining an attainable goal as itself the optimistic process of defining an attainable goal. In a sense her diary is already the attainment of the goal insofar as stating a goal already both marks and produces both the goal and the hope she needs to attain the goal. Lorelei, the diarist, who produces and is produced by the diary that constitutes Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, becomes the diarist the gentleman suggests that she be, recording the thoughts she already has and thinks she has, producing the naively smug tone of a being who thinks she has thoughts worthy of recording. This performative doubling—they are what they are and their tones impart what they say they are and the ways they say it makes them what they are—manifests in tone, in what we audiate of the characters’ resolve to resolve, to be what they are as they tell themselves what they are, where the motivations for writing become the substance of the writing itself, especially insofar as the pose of a diary is a writing for self. The tones produce the personalities they represent, suggesting that tone is personality. Tone constitutes personality insofar as personality is comprised of the same attitudinal, performative aspects as is tone. Like tone, personality is varied, inconsistent, layered, and yet sounds a consistent set of notes for any inscribed personage. In turn, the tonal composition of the character appears simultaneously to reflect the complexity of the character who inscribes self and to produce the self who is

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recording itself. This moebius of tone and personality, thus, turns on itself, offering the illusion that the tonality of fictional diaries precedes and produces the personality whom we imagine is writing it. Harker is the reasonable everyman who overcomes hideous trauma. Bridget recounts envy, resentment, and resolve as a mode of continuing her perverse yet hopeful relation to herself. Lorelei’s instinctively fecund but apparently innocent commentary reflects and produces an innocent, stupid, but potentially canny Lorelei. Instead of deriving from diction and syntax, tone appears already to prescribe the diction and syntax to come. Which comes first? Tone or the expression that results in tone? And given that none of these diarists actually exist—they are fictions—the tone that resounds from the fiction is also the tone that defines the fiction of characterological self-expression. Tone’s relation to inscription is like the diaries’ relation to the characters. Does this moebius strip of imaginary mutual inspiration work the same way when fictional texts deploy characters’ speaking to themselves in the guise of witnessed “interior monologues” as a device by which characters appear to characterize themselves not only by what they say about themselves but also in the syntax, diction—in the tone—that comprises their self-characterizations? Does the tone of characters’ interior monologues audiate the personality that produces the discourse? Do we then, in the same kind of reversal that characterizes narrative’s production of the illusion of a narrator, displace that tone back into the illusory presence of the fictional personality produced by its cited selfcommentary, a commentary whose presentation is framed by a narrator who has organized its rendition?

Self/Voice::Voice/Self “That is my face,” said Rhoda, “in the looking-glass behind Susan’s shoulder—that face is my face. But I will duck behind her to hide it, for I am not here, I have no face. Other people have faces; Susan and Jinny have faces; they are here. Their world is the real world. The things they lift are heavy. They say Yes, they say No; whereas I shift and change and am seen through in a second. If they meet a housemaid she looks at them without laughing. But she laughs at me. They know what to say if spoken



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to. They laugh really; they get angry really; while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.”1 “I hate the small looking-glass on the stairs,” said Jinny. “It shows our heads only; it cuts off our heads. And my lips are too wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much when I laugh. Susan’s head, with its fell look, with its grass-green eyes which poets will love, Bernard said, because they fall upon close white stitching, put mine out; even Rhoda’s face mooning, vacant, is completed, like those white petals she used to swim in her bowl. So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glass hangs, and I see myself entire.”2 Contemplating what they see when they look at themselves in mirrors (a figuration that itself redoubles the process of verbal self-inscription), two of the six speaking characters of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves perform themselves contemplating themselves performing themselves. The interior monologues—these speeches exist in quotation marks, but always without evidence of a listener (other than the speaker) or any conversational rejoinder—tonally enact the personalities of the characters who are speaking about their personalities. Although both Rhoda and Jinny are describing themselves in the particularly detached fashion we might attribute to a hovering narrator or some other distanced observer, the syntax and diction of the self-characterizations manifest the personalities  the speakers enact in their self-descriptions, as the passages’ tone that produces, then seems to derive from the character whose thoughts the passage inscribes. They speak what they are; what they are produces their speech, even as we already know that the novel’s mode of characterological self-presentation is a trope that simultaneously reeks of contrivance and yet seems utterly frank and devoid of craft. In its self-contradictions, Rhoda’s self-characterization enacts the same moebius dynamic as the diary passages. Presenting herself as “not here,” Rhoda describes herself as having “no face.” Where her compatriots’ world is the “real world,” Rhoda is evanescent, “I shift and change and am seen through in a second.” Rhoda makes herself appear as she describes herself as disappearing; she asserts a personality as she characterizes herself as being uncertain, as being a follower who must watch others to know what to do. At the same

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time she is sure of her uncertainty, asserting her lack of assertiveness as she ducks behind Susan to hide. Spiraling self-contradiction, Rhoda’s monologue presents a self that she does not want to be seen as she presents it to be audiated, enacting her conflicting desires to say Yes like Susan and Jinny and yet also to say No. This produces a tone of hesitation and uncertainty, of oscillation and blurring that itself makes Rhoda difficult to see. She asserts that she is nonassertive; being assertive about her lack of assertiveness brings herself into sight on the occasions she declares herself to be unseeable. Rhoda’s vision of her unseeable self intones contemplation, enacting a persona who can stand back and see her relation to others from a distance—from the distance of the one who is not present in the mirror, who stands outside and observes her evanescence. Rhoda’s diction tends toward the abstract: the others see a “real world”; they lift “heavy” things. The others “laugh really; they get angry really.” Rhoda not only takes her cues from them a step or two away, she also mimics them at a temporal distance: “while I have to look first and do what other people do when they have done it.” Like her observing, then mirroring, Rhoda’s self-description is structured by her comparisons of self and others, where she always comes second, later, an afterthought. Her self-description is forthright in its self-abnegation, enacting her relation both to the community and to herself—except, that even though she “ducks” away so as not to see her own face, she offers an astute perception of her position in the world. Jinny, on the other hand, wants to see herself—and wants to see herself seeing herself. She hates that the mirror reflects only her face. And like all of those with narcissistic tendencies, Jinny is self-critical. She examines herself carefully. “My lips are too wide, and my eyes are too close together; I show my gums too much when I laugh.” She envies the other girls their faces, based on what Bernard has observed. Susan has “grass-green eyes which poets will love,” while Rhoda’s face, though “vacant,” “is completed, like those white petals she used to swim in her bowl.” Jinny attends to the surface and relies on other characters’ perceptions as her way to a broader vision. Like the adjectives Jinny deploys in her self-description, Jinny is impressionistic and attracted by the poetic visions of others. Her notion of beauty is someone else’s—Bernard’s in this passage— and she endeavors to embody the beauty that others value. At the same time, Jinny is energetic, unsettled, even a little competitive.



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Dispersing energy, she composes her sentences in short phrases, the main clauses interrupted by short, dependent clauses, all jumping around from topic to topic as she describes herself running from one stair landing to the next to find a better mirror: “So I skip up the stairs past them, to the next landing, where the long glass hangs, and I see myself entire.” From part to whole, Jinny looks for a self she already sees in comparison to and through the eyes of others. The passages themselves also work in comparison to as well as in unison with one another, producing simultaneously a sense of the choral character of the group of six young students as well as their distinct personae. Just as the combined tone of the speakers evinces the rhythms, moods, and maturing apperceptions of individuals, the novel tracks them in their trajectory from innocence to the invasion of death to maturity and old age, the idiosyncratic tones of each anticipates and matures/celebrates/suffers the fates offered by life, as their responses derive the personae each character establishes. In contrast to Rhoda, Jinny seems extroverted and confident, even if she is insecure about her beauty. She is lively, personable, outgoing. In contrast to Jinny, Rhoda becomes even more reclusive, thoughtful, hesitant. The tones we audiate from their soliloquies produce a sense of personalities that reperform themselves as they recircle in their relation to one another through the narrative. Tone, hence, does not simply derive from the ways that diction, syntax, and expression enact a persona; it also emerges as an effect of the collision of different tones that resound with different speakers. If we add the monologue of the third female in the group of young wards, Susan, the tones of both Rhoda and Jinny change slightly: “For how many months,” said Susan, “for how many years, have I run up these stairs, in the dismal days of winter, in the chilly days of spring? Now it is midsummer. We go upstairs to change into white frocks to play tennis—Jinny and I with Rhoda following after. I count each step as I mount, counting each step something done with. So each night I tear off the old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball. I do this vindictively, while Betty and Clara are on their knees. I do not pray. I revenge myself upon the day. I wreak my spite upon its image.”3 Preceding the previous two speeches (which appear in this text in the reverse order of their appearance in The Waves), Susan’s speech

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intones practicality and bitterness in contrast to Jinny’s enthusiasm and Rhoda’s recalcitrance. In the text, Susan’s speech sets up the girls’ section of this midsummer’s day in the characters’ early teen years. Evincing a keen sense of time’s passage, characterized by conflicting feelings of relief and resentment, Susan’s self-characterization enacts, via its repetition of words and phrases, competing impressions of temporal repetition and evaporation. Susan combats the inevitabilities of time’s passage by attempting to control it, counting steps and days, dispensing with them as they have dispensed with her. Her tone audiates as both pragmatic and bitter, as the plaint of a no-nonsense realist who is more than willing to face the disappearance of each day by displacing her grief into anger. Setting up the time and place, Susan’s resentful pragmatism sets a down-to-earth stage for the increasingly whimsical tones of her companions, who intone, in contrast, enthusiasm, insecurity, and a sense of the roles of each. Susan is the pragmatist, Jinny the flirtatious beauty, Rhoda, the retiring but perceptive quasi-outsider. The tones of their interior monologues augment one another, becoming increasingly choral, with Jinny’s light notes highlighting Susan’s adduction of temporal rhythm, and Rhoda’s deep notes sounding a shy, plaintive counterpoint. Comparing the tones of these self-descriptions with music is one way to understand how each of these passages plays both singly and in relation to the others, not simply as they accrue in the linear order of their presentation but as they reverberate in retrospection, as we cannot audiate Rhoda without also recalling Susan and Jinny. As we audiate Rhoda, Susan and Jinny reappear with slightly different tones, harmonizing, clashing, becoming more idiosyncratic in one way or another. Susan becomes grimmer at the advent of Jinny; Jinny looks lively and sociable when Rhoda intones. Tone offers the subtleties, the contrasting multiplicities, a sense of each character’s “voice” both as the imaginary of literal speech and as a perspective and position occupied by an intonement that becomes increasingly complex.

Intoning Fate The Waves constructs the narrative of the lives of its six characters via their individual monologues; the narrative, hence, is largely a matter of intoned personalities, focused on the inmixture of



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characters through lifetimes. Its scope is, thus, broad, impressionistic; its viewpoints multiple, clashing, harmonizing. Many more traditional narratives with more overt third-person narrators also dramatize characters by presenting a character’s self-contemplation and commentary. Ensconced within a narration more visibly conducted by a third-person narrator, these mental soliloquies often reflect thoughts characters feel they cannot say openly. The tone of this “interior” monologue offers the illusion of a franker, more direct and honest portrait of a character than the tone of the narrator’s depictions of actions and dialogue, but it also proffers knowledge that produces complexity, as contradictions between thought and action might accrue. Presenting a character’s tone by means of interior monologue may license the narrator’s continued narration as if from that character’s point of view, even if the discourse is no longer the character’s own. For example, Ralph Ellison’s short story, “King of the Bingo Game,” deploys a character’s speaking to himself as a way to introduce the character—and his tendencies—via the tone of his own interior commentary: There on his right, two fellows were drinking wine out of a bottle wrapped in a paper bag, and he could hear soft gurgling the dark. His stomach gave a low, gnawing growl. “If this was down South,” he thought, “all I’d have to do is lean over and say, ‘Lady, gimme a few of those peanuts, please ma’am,’ and she’d pass me the bag and never think nothing of it. Or he could ask the fellows for a drink in the same way.”4 Sitting in the audience in a movie theatre/bingo parlor, the impoverished protagonist compares the generosity of southerners and northerners. Hungry and thirsty, he wishes he could believe that his neighbors were as generous as strangers had been when he was in the south. His internal commentary to himself intones his longing for the south and the past as well as for the kind of generosity that would palliate his hunger and thirst. His address to a southern stranger would be polite; her response would be charitable as would that of his wine-drinking neighbors. It is, for him, already a matter of tone. This comparison also intones an implied criticism of northerners as well as his own sense of estrangement. A southern woman would “pass the bag” and “never think nothing of it,” while he imagines his northern compatriots to be grudging. Not only does

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this evince a tone of vague irritation, but it also suggests a difference between himself and the rest of the audience that imparts a slight sense of the superiority of generous southerners, including himself, who would “never think nothing of” giving a few peanuts to a hungry man.” It also commences the sense of division and exception that will characterize the protagonist’s experience through the rest of the story. The tone of the protagonist’s statement to himself continues in the third-person narrator’s continuation of his thoughts, no longer specifically quoted, but still attributed to the protagonist, arriving via the narrator taking on the protagonist’s voice. Folks down South stuck together that way; they didn’t even have to know you. But up here it was different. Ask somebody for something, and they’d think you were crazy. Well, I ain’t crazy. I’m just broke, ’cause I got no birth certificate to get a job, and Laura ’bout to die ’cause we got no money for a doctor. But I ain’t crazy.5 The narrator continues the passage by reproducing the protagonist’s quoted tone, intervening to recount the protagonist’s thoughts, moving gradually from what the protagonist intones to himself to a narrated imitation of this interior voice to an even more detached commentary on the protagonist’s state of mind: “And yet a pinpoint of doubt was focused in his mind as he glanced toward the screen.”6 Moving from first to third person, from the protagonist himself to a rendition of his thoughts that matches the protagonist’s tone to a third-person description of his feelings, this opening paragraph sets up the three perspectives that constitute the story’s modes of narration. Grounded in the protagonist’s incipient tone, the story’s diverging perspectives offer an almost three-dimensional view of the protagonist’s ensuing actions. The first would seem to continue in the protagonist’s point of view and from his consciousness, as he knows he has won the chance to spin the prize wheel. The second is the protagonist’s delusive sense of magical power. This second perspective of the protagonist begins by matching the protagonist’s own tone to himself, but moves quickly into a new persona, characterized by his incipient victory, but seen from a third perspective, that of a third-person narrator. After seeing that he had



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a winning card, he shouts “Bingo,” and then “he stumbled down the aisle and up the steps to the stage into a light so sharp and bright that for a moment it blinded him, and he felt that he had moved into the spell of some strange, mysterious power. Yet it was as familiar as the sun, and he knew it was the perfectly familiar bingo.”7 Simultaneously confused and elated, blinded and visionary, the protagonist’s split from his incipient interior monological insight becomes the conflation of two other perspectives—his own as narrated by a third-person narrator and his behaviors as seen by everyone else. This not only recalls the initial split between southerners and northerners he observed in his opening remark but also reinterprets this split between strangers and the familiar south as a division within his own warring senses of estrangement and familiarity. His first-person dialogic commentary has split into two third-person perspectives on himself. Having achieved the five-number match, the protagonist now has the chance to spin the wheel that will determine his prize. Anticipating victory, he begins to feel some mysterious connection to the machine. As he pushes the button that controls the wheel, he becomes delusional, convinced that he controls and is controlled by the machine. His sense of triumph, narrated via the same thirdperson narrator who recounted his initial comments, produces his sense of his fated superiority and ability to merge with the machine he hopes will fulfill his needs and desires. A third perspective shifts to the perspectives of other characters, and away from his internal experience, offering both a different perspective and an implicit comparison of the protagonist’s experience with more-or-less inconsonant observations of others witnessing his derangement. Thus establishing the protagonist as a wistful, alienated, and nostalgic southerner, what the protagonist says to himself grounds the story’s rendition of his spiraling sense of euphoric, delusive control that derives from resentment, a feeling of superiority over these alien northerners, and most likely, his own hunger. During the protagonist’s manic flight over the stage with the machine’s controlling button, the narrative shifts back and forth from renditions of his thoughts and sensations to the reactions of the officials and crowd. His increasing desperation matches his sense of victory, shouting, “Live, Laura, baby. I got holt of it now, sugar. Live!” as “the audience quieted like the dying of a huge fan.”8 The audience begins to make fun of him, and in the same spirit and

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tone of his first observation of northerners’ lack of generosity, he becomes defiant, “They think I’m crazy. Well, let ’em laugh. I’ll do what I got to do.”9 Again quoted by a third-person narrator, this statement of resolve is a response to his first observation. If northerners won’t share, he will take what he needs, especially as he has had the chance to win it fairly. The story ends with a description of his reception of what seems to be an assurance of victory. The third-person narrator begins to move away from the tone of the character’s internal commentary and into a more fatalistic perspective: “But as he warmed in the justice of the man’s tight smile he did not see the man’s slow wink, nor see the bow-legged man behind him step clear of the swiftly descending curtain and set himself for a blow. He only felt the dull pain exploding in his skull, and he knew even as it slipped out of him that his luck had run out on the stage.”10 Returning to the question of generosity he first raised, the story depicts the outcome of his rebellion in the only way it can—from the distance of a thirdperson narrator who links the protagonist’s consciousness with his fate, a fate his initial observation might already have foretold.

18 Telling Tones

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on,” quips the character Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame.1 Narrative fiction always tells us where it is going—“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young gentleman in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” What do we really think is going to happen in the novel that ensues? Don’t we already know—and don’t we know because the arch, tongue-in-cheek tone of the opening line tells us to expect the expectable, which expectation is ironic because we also expect fiction to surprise us. How do we know the sentence’s tone is ironic? Because if the wealthy young man’s desire for a wife were indeed “truth,” it would not need to be “universally acknowledged,” and yet because it is so (or the narrator tells us it is), it becomes a truth truer than true—that is, a truth that barely needs to be pronounced. Hence the opening announcement enacts the “too much” of a pronouncement of truth making fun of its announcement, which means, perversely, that the narrative will indeed run true to form. In offering a clue to its conclusion, the narrative becomes more about fulfilling expectations than surprising them and we know that because we can already read the tone of the first sentence. And we hope the narrative will fulfill our astute readings of opening tone and cues.

Setting the Tone, Recounting the Telling The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream and lights began to appear along the shore. The Chapman lighthouse, a three-legged thing erect on a mud-flat, shone strongly. Lights of ships moved in the

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fairway—a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.2 Setting the stage for the telling it hosts, this description of location offers an ambiance of light and temporality. Dusk—itself a framed middling point between day and night, between the qualities of light and darkness that illuminate the city and the river—sets a mood, reflects the ominous urban reflection on the sky, and recalls the day’s brooding sunshine gloom. Halfway between sea and city at the end of a voyage but before reaching port, a group of men from both the ship and the city sit topside, listening to a seaman tell a story. The Director of Companies, the ship’s Captain, the Lawyer, the Accountant, and a fifth unnamed speaker, who recounts what the sailor recounts as the narrator of the narrating of a story, all listen to Marlow, as he begins to spin his yarn: “‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’”3 Initiating the tale he is about to recount, Marlow’s observation situates his own account in the same duskiness that enfolds the ship. But before he begins, the sailor who narrates his narration observes: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted) and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.4 Prefacing and enframing Marlow’s telling, the fifth passenger’s description of the ways seamen’s tales frame themselves offers an analysis of the stories as already self-enclosed in one way or another even as they exceed their occasions and framings. Either narratives consist of an edible kernel within a shell (i.e., story and lesson) or, as in the case of Marlow’s yarns, the tale is turned inside out, its hazy encasing intuitions and perceptions made visible by the glow of its own energy, an energy that also, like the “moonshine” beyond the tale itself, enfolds and illumines the haze already lit



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from within. Layer inflects layer, cascading inwardly and outwardly simultaneously. There is no “frame” here, but instead a dynamic, a fusion chemistry that may appear as rings, but whose energies expand in waves moving inwardly and outwardly, producing a three-dimensionality throughout.5 I have always been fascinated by the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I quote it almost every chance I get. It seems to convey something about almost every aspect of literature, from the operations of language, to issues of cause and effect, character, narrators, and in this context, the dynamics through which various elements of narrative operate in relation to one another, including, especially, tone. The novella’s opening sets the context of telling as an ambiance defined by its middling location (as the example of Marlow’s exceptionally framed and indirect manner of recounting enacts), and as even the physical disposition of the teller of the tale to come. Framing his own tale with an account of the experiences of Roman colonizers, Marlow, who is sitting “cross-legged right aft, leaning against the mizzen-mast” (another middling location, literally surrounded by the ship), begins his tale in the broadest politics of world conquest, while “lifting one arm from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards, so that with his legs folded before him he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes and without a lotus-flower.”6 Despite (or because of) his position in the middle, he can span both time and space, history and the globe. Told on one river, Marlow’s narrative focuses on another, a second river in the middle of Africa. The tone of his telling (which begins just after the narrator’s commentary about the exceptional character of Marlow’s tales) is already conditioned by the novella’s elaborate setting in the midst of mists, as the reflexive illumination of hazes and halos. Like any “framed narrative,” Marlow’s narrative cannot escape its context, one so artfully defined in Heart of Darkness. “I don’t want to bother you much with what happened to me personally,” he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear. “Yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap. It was the farthest point of navigation and the culminating point

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of my experience. It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was somehow enough to—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No. Not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.”7 Enacting in its telling the very same dynamic the opening narrator had defined as both its context and its method—its glowing haze— Marlow’s tale begins by denying its ultimate “meaning,” as it “seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me.” Suggesting that he is not going to focus on himself, Marlow goes on to focus on himself, or at least on the ways his experience has affected him. The tone of his exegesis is modest insofar as he seems to discount himself, and yet already hints at the glow to come, the glow that somehow illuminates the lack of clarity that characterizes his response to the experience. Appearing to confide in his listeners, Marlow intones frankness, honesty—“you ought to know how I got out there.” He summarizes his tale’s dynamic, pointing to the “culminating point of my experience” that occurs at the “farthest point of navigation.” What seems to offer superlatives, however, operates as a part of Marlow’s more matter-of-fact, modest tone, produced by the way his rendition begins to break down into fragments and uncertain impressions at the end of this opening gambit, conveyed in simple and repetitive terms—“not very clear,” “not extraordinary in any way,” “and yet it seemed to throw a kind of light.” Mustering the vague and impressionistic tone of everyday plain speech, Marlow’s style of storytelling seems unremarkable except for its carefully set, middling context, and his own hints to some extraordinary insight or experience he will soon recount. The incipient narrator establishes the context of the telling to follow, in so doing producing the cracked “shell” that contains the “kernel,” a shell that already surrounds the enframed narrative both in the opening narrator’s setting of expectation produced by the posture of all in the middle of diurnal processes and in the sense that the entire atmosphere itself defines the tale: men on a boat on the river in medias res. The opening’s tone of an unsettled sense of anticipation, the careful mapping of a liminal atmosphere, its brief characterization of the unlikely dynamics of the story to come from the Buddha-like Marlow seated on the deck, all tell us calmly— modestly even—of the significant insight to follow, which will be,



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as we already know, outside of the tale, like a haze glowing in the story’s illumination. And the middle of Marlow’s story indeed offers precisely the self-contradictory tone of medial amazement at the everyday that Marlow’s commencement promises: Going up that river was like travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowing distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.8 Offering a similar image of illuminated gloom the fifth listener/ narrator evoked at the beginning of the tale, this passage in which Marlow describes his feelings as he begins his first voyage up the river, iterates the opening description of the light on the Thames as well as again evoking ancient times, primeval lands, and a waterway that disappears in “gloom.” The tone of this passage is, however, a bit more energetic than Marlow’s opening comments. Deploying more hyperbolic and kinetic verbs and adjectives—“Rioted,” “empty,” “great,” “impenetrable,” trees like “kings,” “joy” (or the lack thereof), “gloom,” “overshadowing”—produces a tone of greater extremes. As in the beginning of Marlowe’s comments, negatives and delimited phrases mitigate, or better “overshadow” any sense of enthusiasm or wonder. “There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine.” The waterway was “deserted,” “merging into ‘the gloom of overshadowing distances.’” That same brooding, reminiscent tone continues, occupying much of the middle of the novella. Marlow continues his meditations on traveling the river: There were moments when one’s past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of the strange world of plants and water and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an

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implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards.9 Getting “used to it” enacts the very attitude the tone of his telling offers—an evenness that levels the horror and the unmarked beauty of “the strange world of plants and water and silence.” Referring to his memories of the trip as a “noisy dream,” Marlow enacts one tactic for maintaining equilibrium. And his tone in talking about the trip to Africa is as meditative as the way one speaks about dreams— and it is as distanced and unreal. Yet at the same time, Marlow’s tone always promises an insight: a truth about the character of men in unsullied places. There is one hint, however, of a more whimsical side to Marlow’s apprehensions: the hippos and alligators who sun “themselves side by side.” His evocation of hippos goes back to an earlier conversation Marlow has with the station manager as he is beginning the task of repairing the boat, in which the manager describes the habits of an old hippo: There was an old hippo that had the bad habit of getting out on the bank and roaming at night over the station grounds. The pilgrims used to turn out in a body and empty every rifle they could lay hands on at him. Some even had sat up o’ nights for him. All this energy was wasted, though. “That animal has a charmed life,” he said; “but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man—you apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.”10 The figure of the hippo offers a counter to the gloom, sitting, as it does in the sun alongside alligators and tramping all over the station. Like Marlow (or Marlow like the hippo), the hippo seems unperturbed, and distanced from the affairs of the colonizers whom it observes as they may observe it—as an impervious and irritating outsider. And although “no man . . . bears a charmed life,” Marlow seems to have survived, having gained something, an insight about the nature of humanity, or the abuses of power, or the ultimate insensitivity of nature that has made him the Buddha-like figure he has become.11 Because we read forward and backward, the end of the narration that presents Marlow’s telling is as suggestive as the beginning.



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After Marlow recounts his ultimate reaction to the Mr. Kurtz he first idolized, then pitied, and whose reputation he finally saves by lying about Kurtz’s last words to Kurtz’s “intended,” the narrative returns to its account of Marlow’s recital: Marlow ceased and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time. “We have lost the first of the ebb,” said the Director suddenly. I raised my head. The offing was barred by a black band of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.12 Marlow is as distant and medial as he was at the beginning, as the narrator breaks the spell only to recommence it with a final evocation of clouds and “sombre” water that again promise some dark truth in some broad context. As the tale of the telling ends, the narrator echoes Marlow, the tone of telling becoming pervasive, resounding through the gloom. In Heart of Darkness, the end indeed is in the beginning, but this notion of beginning and end is less about plot than about the ambiance created by, and yet credited with inspiring the tones of telling the narrative inscribes. Because this is a narrative about a telling, as the narrator interrupts Marlow’s narrative occasionally to describe his demeanor, the tone of Marlowe’s telling seems doubly present, not only in what the telling’s diction and syntax suggest but also in the novella’s consciousness of the style of the telling itself: how Marlow is seated, how he begins, when he pauses, how the environment matches the telling. The telling of the tale is an account of a speaker speaking, like the author who reads his or her own texts publicly. There are three tones here: the narrator’s, Marlow’s, and the tone evinced by Marlow’s performance—his “meditating Buddha” demeanor providing a tone in itself. These layers circle around, interpenetrate, and inspire one another, each contributing to each, so that the narrative of the telling gains the interlaced complexity of a Borromean knot, each link producing and inextricable from the others. Tone is the sum, the effect, and the catalyst of the layers of stories. It is in this tale, both the “heart” and the rivers that frame it, both the “haze” that surrounds and the glow that makes it visible.

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19 iTone

My journal is a private affair, but as I cannot know the time of my coming death, and since I am not disposed, however unfortunately, to the serious consideration of self-termination, I am afraid others will see these pages.1 So commences Percival Everett’s novel, Erasure, a first-person account of a writer writing, not the novel that we are reading which is about a writer writing a novel, but about that writer writing a different first-person novel ensconced in its entirety within the narrative of the journal-writing narrator. Poised as a journal that may or may not someday have a reader other than its writer, the novel about the writer writing a novel enacts the decoying mechanisms of any bait-and-switch con. Draw the watcher/reader/mark’s attention away from what is happening where it is happening and we can produce what appears to be the illusion of something unexpected appearing, or something expected appearing in a place we did not expect it to appear.

Narra​tor↔T​one↔C​harac​ter↔ Narrat​or↔To​ne↔Ch​aract​er↔To​ne The novel’s production of the personality of its first-person writer occurs not only as the sum of what the narrator writes about himself but also as an effect of what the writing itself intones in its style. Our attention attracted to the facts of his life and

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his self-characterizations, we may well read past the text’s more fruitful cues, which all reside in the way the writer characterizes himself—in his personality, predilections, and ways of thinking signaled by diction, syntax, the choices about what he tells us, and, well, the sum of it all, tone: I have dark brown skin, curly hair, a broad nose, some of my ancestors were slaves and I have been detained by pasty white policemen in New Hampshire, Arizona and Georgia and so the society in which I live tells me I am black; that is my race. Though I am fairly athletic, I am no good at basketball. I listen to Mahler, Aretha Franklin, Charlie Parker and Ry Cooder on vinyl records and compact discs. I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, hating every minute of it. I am good at math. I cannot dance. I did not grow up in any inner city or the rural south.2 The writer narrator’s self-description is made for a journal? Why does he have to tell himself who he is if he already knows? Or is this already the obvious ploy of using one apparent context (journal writing) to introduce something else, the first bait-and-switch? Given the self-description’s apparent artificiality, in the sense that it appears more as a self-introduction to others than a journal entry and therefore addresses an audience, the writer becomes the self he wants (consciously or unconsciously) others to see, the offered facts, style, voice, and tone already seeming to anticipate and address a set of assumptions: “I am, as a matter of fact, not the racial stereotype of the racial stereotype.” This sense of existing against stereotypical expectation derives not only from the writer’s set of chosen negations but also from the style of the writing itself insofar as style, too, has appertained to stereotypical associations. The passage’s syntax audiates as straightforward and matterof-fact. The sentences are simple and declarative. There are few adjectives or adverbs. Its series of sentences appears to provide a list of attributes. Those attributes, however, push back against known yet unspoken cultural assumptions about race, which produces within this plainspoken description an argument about the limiting presumptions of stereotypes, while the description performs exceptions to that stereotype. The upshot of this implied conflict produces an individual who, in not complying with stereotypical norms, also pushes back against them subtly, as an intellectual who



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can see the racial expectations of both races as he subtly situates himself as an exception. Ending the first sentence/declaration that moves from a basic and matter-of-fact physical description to a dive into origins with a brief description of the effects—the detainments—that, perhaps more than physical characteristics, certify his race to himself, the writer’s self-descriptions are also and at the same time an account of the superficial readings of racist thought. The bait of self-description turns into the payoff of social commentary. Ensconced within the matter-of-fact recital of cause and effect, the writer’s declaration of the effects of this racial cause offers an understated but piercing illustration of racism itself. The writer continues his modest, tonally plainspoken, selfdescription with a series of capabilities, the first of which simultaneously complies with and works against assumptions about racial predilections, while the concluding details fly in the face of stereotypes. The writer’s racial contradictions in themselves offer only a glancing patina of self-characterization. More to the point is the tone of the presentation, as the writer’s matter-of-fact poise, which, rendered toward the end of the passage in increasingly simple sentences, becomes, in fact, less matter-of-fact, its mode of presentation conflicting with the sometimes more momentous (i.e., Harvard), sometimes more stereotypically stereotypical (i.e., the ability to dance) attributes African-Americans might have. The bait of calm self-description lures us to the capture of social insights as well as to the writer/character’s perceptual advantage. The tone of all of this exists not simply in the pose of pragmatic exposition but in the passage’s performance of vaguely critical, vaguely humorous commentary on racist thinking in relation to an individual who can see racist thought for what it is, exposed primarily through the ways facts reveal more substantial social truths. The passage not only presents what appear to be straightforward details about an individual; it does so within the “halo” of the meanings of these details in a broader cultural context, then reverberates the ensuing clash between assumptions and facts as enacting a personality, a character/writer who is wise enough to see the both/ and predicaments of assumption and exception within which he exists. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me I am not black enough. Some people whom the

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society calls white tell me the same thing. I have heard this mainly about my novels, from editors who have rejected me and reviewers whom I have apparently confused and, on a couple of occasions, on a basketball court when upon missing a shot I muttered Egads.3 By citing other peoples’ estimations of his racial aptness, the writer/ character brings the entire concept of race into question, not, perhaps, so much as a descriptor but as a determinant of human possibility. His quoting himself muttering Egads, however, repaints even that declaration of circumstances with yet another unexpected performance that offers the stereotype of someone in a Dickens’s novel or someone who might have been reading a Dickens’s novel. Enacting his difference via the tone of an expletive only an overeducated, literary type might use, the writer performs the narrator/character as the kind of person who can layer level-headed commentary with eccentric literary expletives. In other words, the writer/character is a writer who characterizes himself as a character who characterizes himself. Enacting the failure of stereotypes in his self-characterization as well as in the very art of the account the first-person narrator is producing performs a layered telling in which every conflicting perception produces yet another layer of insight. These conflicting layers—the stereotype of the black man, the narrator’s perception of the stereotype of the black man, the narrator’s self-production of his difference to the stereotype, the narrator’s self-consciousness of that production, the narrator’s self-conscious enactment of the character/writer who lays out these conflicts, etc.—complicate the narrator’s self-enactment as character in its multiple and often selfcontradictory vestiges. From the opening words that signal the narrator’s consciousness that the writer’s confidences may well not remain private, the narration enacts a dynamic in which there is always the sense that the narrator sees beyond what he is narrating and signals that insight, though often indirectly, in the matter-offact statements of self and stereotype that characterize his selfpresentation. As he lays out the stereotypes to which he does not conform, the narrator/writer/character evenly enacts a continued critique of racial assumptions while establishing the presumptions that ground the novel’s dilemmas and conflicts, which also present and play out the same socially approved dynamic between racist



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expectations and the qualities of individuals. The tone this narratorial layering audiates is a cacophony of thoughtless truisms managed by a perceptive artist who can play these layers with and against one another. Though matter-of-fact and modestly self-declaiming, the narrator/character who enacts and who is produced by this tone is, in the end, the modest visionary writer, who is scholarly, perceptive, in many ways normative, and finally, passionate all at once. Tone as enacted by this complex voice is more infusive than the simple audiation of a personality or type. The tone that produces the sense of the narrator/character as even, perceptive, intellectual and cleverly satirical is the sum effect of his often understated observations about the assumptions of racial apperception.4 And the tone suggests that he is also more than that, especially in the deft economies and careful minimalizing of the crudest racist stereotypes. Tone here is character; the writer/character makes himself, even and especially in what we might think he does not realize that he is saying—in a sort of textual unconscious that intones anyway. His evenness represses a feeling of anger and disappointment; he is also wounded, resentful, and sad that he and his work will not be adjudged by the quality of their art instead of by the superficial stereotypes that condition apperceptions of the capabilities of its maker, as well as the general cultural failure to assume that great art can come from an individual, who like all individuals, always exceeds the simplistic stereotypes of any cultural moment. This opening establishment of character via the tone of its imagined self-presentation also sets up the novel’s (and the writer/ character’s) dilemma of how to combat the proliferation of the kinds of writing heralded as successful because they comply with and reinforce the stereotypes of an oppressed racial underclass, and thus continue to produce the underclass whose writing is a recital of the stereotype. Taunted by a group of white “avant-garde” writers at an academic conference where he delivers a paper on Roland Barthes’s S/Z, the narrator also sees his difference from a certain portion of academe that situates itself and its pathetic self-promotions on the other side of the cultural stereotype. As self-styled, white, countercultural academic artists, these bellicose wannabes assume they rebel against artistic and cultural norms, even as, as the narrator suggests, again in a matter-of-fact manner that obscures his disdain while also resounding it, they embody and reinforce them.

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Hence, finding himself in a no-man’s land of atypicality, the writer/character faces the complications of an elderly mother, a medical doctor sister who is murdered at the Women’s Health Clinic she runs, and difficulty publishing his work because it is not “black enough.”5 He takes a leave of absence from his west coast academic position to return to Washington, DC, to care for his aging mother after the death of his sister. Needing money for her care, the writer/ character sees a daytime talk show, hosted by an African-American woman, who also promotes a book club. A guest on the show is an African-American woman who has written a novel that takes place in a ghetto (even though she has spent no time in a ghetto) whose language is, according to the talk show host, “so real,” in a novel where “the characters are so true to life.”6 Noting, however, that this spurious take on ghetto life has earned its author a lot of money, and feeling the injustice of perpetuating such problematic representations that are successful precisely because that is what they do, the writer/character spurs himself into a writing project that proves the falseness and cultural accommodation of the novel he witnessed on the television show by an author whose picture he stares at on the cover of Time magazine: I sat and stared at Juanita Mae Jenkins’ face on Time magazine. The pain started in my feet and coursed through my legs, up my spine and into my brain and I remembered passages of Native Son and The Color Purple and Amos and Andy and my hands began to shake, the world opening around me, tree roots trembling on the ground outside, people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahvre! And I was screaming inside, complaining that I didn’t sound like that, that my mother didn’t sound like that, that my father didn’t sound like that and I imagined myself sitting on a park bench counting the knives in my switchblade collection and a man came up to me and he asked me what I was doing and my mouth opened and I couldn’t help what came out, “why fo you be axin?”7 Vengefully taking on the stereotype, the writer/character decides to write a similar novel, My Pafology, from the first-person perspective of a young ghetto male, that pokes fun both at the naive appropriation of black experience as a ghetto genre and at the daytime talk show genre itself. The success of the novel also, in the



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end, shows up the engrained racial biases of both American popular and literary cultures, while enacting the ways the production of “authentic” voices is a matter of insincere performance.

Phuck Writing under the pseudonym, Stagg R. Leigh (a version of Lee Shelton or “Stagger Lee,” an early twentieth-century AfricanAmerican folk/crime hero), the writer/character fashions a “ghetto” novel about a high school dropout, Van Go Jenkins, who has a collection of babies with teenage girls he never married and whom he fails to support with what he earns from a warehouse job from which he is always absent. He tells his pool-hall buddies that he wants to get enough money to buy a gun so he can rob “that K’rean muthafucka over in the plaza,” because he doesn’t “like the way the bitch be lookin at me when I be in there.”8 When the warehouse foreman fires him, he does odd jobs for a wealthy black man who lives in the suburbs with his beautiful classy daughter. The daughter, fascinated by his ghetto toughness, invites him to come along with her and her boyfriend to sample the delights of ghetto life, including fried chicken and pot. With the daughter of his employer too drunk to know what is going on, Van Go takes her home and rapes her. The next morning he gets a call from the talk show, who invites him to appear on the show because someone “has a crush” on him.9 When he shows up for the show, instead of a crush, it turns out that the mothers of his illegitimate children want him to take fiscal responsibility for his kids. Van Go gets angry when the audience gets angry at him and escapes the studio, running away as the police chase him. He encounters an ex-girlfriend on the street who points a gun at him. He takes the gun from her and goes, armed, on the lam. The police finally apprehend him when the air bag in the car he has “borrowed” explodes, and as they do, Van Go is delighted that his capture is accompanied by television cameras: “‘Hey, Mama.’ I say. ‘Hey, baby girl. Look at me. I on TV.’”10 As the writer/character of Erasure produces himself via selfdescription as a character intoning a personality the nuances of which are audiated by readers, so that writer/character demonstrates in another vector how writing in the first person produces and intones an entirely different persona. “My name is Van Go Jenkins

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and I’m nineteen years old and I don’t give a fuck about nobody, not you, not my Mama, not the man. The world don’t give a fuck about nobody, so why should I?”11 Embodying the stereotypes appended to a young, African-American who speaks in this manner, Van Go is the first-person narrator of a narrative that produces Van Go Jenkins as the speaker who speaks about himself. Seemingly rebellious, he is simultaneously a vengeful, hurt, follower, assuming the callous attitude he perceives everyone else already has. But like the character/writer who enacts him, Van Go is also divided, ambivalent, of two minds about the culture that misperceives young black males as much as they misperceive themselves. In commenting on the mother of one of his children: I love Cleona and I hate Cleona. There be two lil’ niggers in my head. Nigger A and Nigger B. Nigger A say, be cool, bro, you know you ain’t gots no money, so just let this girl go on back to school and through maf class and English class and socle studies so she can get out and be sumpin. Just let her have a chance, one chance to be that nurse she always talkin bout bein. But Nigger B be laughin, say, Shit, take this bitch home to her house and hit it one times, two times. She got the nerve to be talkin to Jeep-nigger in front of you. Fuck that shit. If she gone dis you like that, nail her ass.12 The tone of Van Go’s speculation is resentment: a feeling of having been abandoned, the hopeless ambitions of a character who sees taking what he thinks he wants as the answer to the impoverished status his resentments have partially already caused. His conscious motivation is something like “What the fuck,” which is an alibi for doing what he wants, taking the vengeful route, and wishing it were otherwise. What Van Go as “Nigger A” wishes for Cleona may well be what he wished for himself, but disappointed, he becomes “Nigger B” needing to demonstrate his power and masculinity to himself. There is not much in the narrator/character of My Pafology’s tone that offers a moment of vulnerability or pathos with which readers might sympathize. Instead Van Go’s insistent heedless bravado creates a persona that intones more like a cartoon character who survives only on the two versions of himself he identifies: The reasonably generous man and the self-destructive pessimist whose



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experiences have convinced him that he has no future, and therefore that it does not make a difference. We see what his potential might have been, what he has lost, and how he has chosen to go on. A sad tale with an unsympathetic, heedless, but not quite evil protagonist. Erasure hosts, thus, two different stories with two distinctly different personae, both created by the same character/writer/ narrator. The text’s production of a character/teller who then seems to produce the text that produces him offers a perpetual moebius in which tone—the tone that produces the fine sense of a character’s personality—constantly contributes to the increasing complication of the persona we imagine is telling. The tone of the telling is the telling of tone. Ultimately the novel, Erasure, takes on an ironic cast as critics nominate My Pafology (which title the writer/character changes to Phuck when the novel is a success), for a national book award. Achieving precisely the dubious distinction accorded such fakeries, the character/narrator has to figure out how to manage this ersatz success. Perhaps all along he has been someone he never thought he was. In this way also, perhaps, plot also continues to define tone, even as the character/writer presumably inscribes himself. Like Van Go, events ranging out of his control come back to recharacterize him.

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20 Toning Fork

Narratives, such as Everett’s Erasure, that intone a self-conscious first-person narrator simultaneously intone the narrator’s consciousness of narrating himself. This produces a tone that evinces a consciousness of itself both as a self and as a tone evincing a consciousness of that self—a species of double (or even triple if the self is conscious of the self as well as of its consciousness of itself) intonement, even if the ostensible recipient of the narrator’s ruminations is a journal or diary. Erasure tracks the paradoxically masked public outing of the narrator’s distaste for jejune racial politics, even as he cynically takes advantage of them. The tones of the novel manifest the narrator’s self-contradictions, which play out in the first-person persona of Van Go in the novel the narrator scribes in response to simplistic celebrations of one-dimensional “ghetto” residents. Hoist by his own petard, the writer/narrator/ character’s capacity to intone what he sees as a delimiting racist portrait of African-Americans not only makes him money but also threatens to expose his cynical imitations of mainstream popular perceptions of black denizens. Already signaled by the novel’s tones, the complexity of the writer/narrator/character’s addressing these racist portraits exposes both his ability to manipulate cultural stereotypes and the ways he is, as he has suggested, always caught in them himself. But what if a character/narrator seems to be more intent on depicting events and impressions of others, where any readerly sense of the narrator’s first-person personality is a by-product of those depictions? In what ways does a first-person narrator intone itself while presenting other characters?

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Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton. There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty to him, although being very shy and a thoroughly nice boy, he had never fought except in the gym.1 These are the opening lines of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which the first-person narrator, Jake, a journalist, commences by describing his acquaintance, Robert Cohn. Although the passage appears to focus on Cohn, what it presents is the narrator’s opinion of Cohn. “Do not think I am very impressed,” the narrator warns in the second sentence. Characterizing Cohn as “shy” twice, the narrator also characterizes him as having a “feeling of inferiority” and sensing that people were “snooty” to him. Depicting this “Jew at Princeton” as a “thoroughly nice boy,” the narrator portrays Cohn’s participation in boxing as a cover for Cohn’s sense of being an outsider—as being different from the Princeton norm. But the narrator’s hints at Cohn’s use of boxing as a mode of self-protection instead of as an avocation also suggests that Cohn is somehow less manly than the narrator, who in comparison, he implies, actually likes boxing—and so much so that the narrator is “not impressed” by the title of “boxing champion of Princeton.” Jake’s boxing fandom is for the real thing beyond the Ivy League. While this brief opening portrait may tell us something about Cohn, it also tells us more about the narrator/Jake whose views it expresses. Beginning an account with a vaguely disparaging description of another character, especially when, in the second sentence, the narrator openly intrudes with his own opinion demeaning the accolade the character could claim, suggests something grudging and resentful about the narrator. As the opening presentation continues and the narrator evokes Cohn’s shyness and niceness, the narrator’s attitude toward those qualities intones as curiously belittling. This tone of vague disparagement raises questions about why the novel begins with this description as well as why the narrator dislikes Cohn. But why? Does the narrator envy Cohn? Is Jake anti-Semitic? Is he worried about



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his accomplishments in comparison to Cohn’s relative privilege (though we know next to nothing about the narrator)? Does the narrator doubt his own manhood? Does starting this way make readers like the narrator and want to identify or sympathize with him? Or does he intone himself as a slightly self-defensive bully from the beginning? One thing this opening does is to raise a number of questions about the narrator/character, Jake, himself. We may or may not like Jake, but the enigma may give us an incentive to read on. At the end of the second chapter of the novel, also devoted to the narrator’s experiences with Cohn, the narrator summarizes: So there you were. I was sorry for him, but it was not a thing you could do anything about, because right away you ran up against the two stubbornnesses: South America could fix it and he did not like Paris. He got the first idea out of a book, and I suppose the second came out of a book too.2 Frustrated by Cohn’s introspections, frustrations, and somewhat emasculating relations with his wife, the narrator dismisses Cohn as naive, as someone who got his ideas from books instead of life. Although the passage expresses the narrator’s pity for Cohn, it yet again establishes the narrator’s sense of his own superiority in relation to him. By implication a man of experience instead of a mere student of second-hand knowledge, the manlier Jake pities the sadly henpecked Cohn. (We learned in the first two chapters that Cohn’s wife is a bit bossy.) Enacting a tone of virile patience that comes from a more certain sense of self, the narrator tries to make himself look generous while yet again deprecating Cohn. The novel, thus, appears to offer two tones at once: one, the generous description made by an observer who sympathetically understands the shy Cohn’s motivations, and the other, the envious, disdainful tones of someone who is clever enough to demonstrate his superiority to Cohn indirectly.3 Ironically, perhaps, in demonstrating his superiority, the narrator also evinces a vaguely petty tone, pocked with hints of insecure competitiveness. Again, does this complex tone produce an intriguing, complex character? Or does it produce a narrator with whom it might be difficult to sympathize? Or maybe both at once? And/or does it set the reader up for the revelation that Jake has a disabling war injury, a

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wound that removes him from certain kinds of manly competition altogether? When the narrator reveals his injury, do we suddenly understand and sympathize with his slightly envious but belittling attitude toward Cohn? Later in the novel, as Jake, his friend, Bill, and Cohn are having dinner in Pamplona, waiting for the running of the bulls, Bill bets Cohn that Brett, the woman the disabled Jake was in love with and her husband, Mike, will arrive that evening. Cohn bets Bill they won’t. As Cohn leaves to get a shave, Bill comments, “Say,” Bill said to me, “have I got any chance on that bet?” “You’ve got a rotten chance. They’ve never been on time anywhere. If their money doesn’t come it’s a cinch they won’t get in tonight.” “I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth. But I had to call him. He’s all right, I guess, but where does he get this inside stuff? Mike and Brett fixed it up with us about coming down here.” I saw Cohn coming over across the square. “Here he comes.” “Well, let him not get superior and Jewish.”4 Again intoning cynical suspicion and open anti-Semitism, the two buddies whose conversation the narrator/character quotes verbatim, display both envy (that Cohn knows something they don’t know) and dislike for Cohn hedged by common courtesy and yet relieved by Bill’s anti-Semitic remark. But that Jake continues to see Cohn as a subpar species of being who somehow nonetheless manages to acquire what Jake wishes he had produced a tone of resentment. Later as the three are having dinner, Cohn decides to go to the station to see if he has won the bet he had made with Bill. Jake accompanies him. We walked to the station. I was enjoying Cohn’s nervousness. I hoped Brett would be on the train. At the station the train was late, and we sat on a baggage-truck and waited outside in the dusk. I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn—nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.5



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The narrator again enacts both cruelty and remorse, two sides of a personality that is clearly disturbed by the figure of Cohn. But that Cohn has had a fling with the woman Jake wants and can never have begins to account for Jake’s attitude toward Cohn from the beginning. Told retrospectively, the novel unfolds the motivation for Jake’s resentment, belittling comments, and even meanness toward Cohn. Cohn has what Jake can never regain, hence Jake’s suggestions of his subpar manliness that take the form of anything available—Cohn’s fears, his domination by his wife, his apparent lack of masculine imperiousness. And if Cohn, who is still presumably potent, is not quite manly, then Jake has a chance at something, if only to be better than Cohn. This would seem, then, to enact a complex, unfortunate, but brave narrator/character, whose resentments we can understand and with whom we can even sympathize, despite his apparent meanness toward Cohn, who seems to become increasingly annoying as the narrator’s demeaning characterizations accrue. The narrator/ character’s tonal discord may serve to impel reading, as it poses, without seeming to do so, a mystery about the narrator’s character and personality, an enigma the novel gradually untangles. Enacting such a narrator seems almost counterintuitive, if we assume that continued reading depends upon the felicity of the teller. But in this novel, the narrator’s opening discord may well spur attention of a different kind. The narrators of Hemingway’s prose occasionally enact even more unpleasant personae. For example, in the short stories collected in A Moveable Feast, the first-person narrator/character (presumably a version of the “author”) unrestrainedly and often undiplomatically offers his impressions of the “real-life” figures with whom he associates while in Paris.6 Each one of these figures suffers, however, at the slighting tones of the narrator, who castigates Gertrude Stein, suggests F. Scott Fitzgerald is under-endowed, and essentially demolishes Ford Madox Ford. In “Ford Madox Ford and The Devil’s Disciple,” the character/narrator recounts how Ford approaches him as he is sitting at the Closerie de Lilas in Paris. He describes him: “It was Ford Madox Ford, as he called himself then, and he was breathing heavily through a heavy, stained mustache and holding himself as upright as an ambulatory, well clothed, up-ended hogshead.”7 Distaste obviously emanating from the description (a “heavy,” “stained,” “hogshead”), the narrator suggests that Ford’s

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self-naming is temporary and perhaps pretentious or opportunistic or some combination of the two, that Ford is dirty, fat, and ungainly. The narrator’s introduction of Ford, however, may provide as much insight on the character of the narrator as it does on Ford. Nasty and mean-spirited, the description prepares us as much for whatever excesses Ford may perform as for the author’s clear dislike. But if readers already like Ford’s writing, how inclined might they be to take the narrator’s nasty estimation? Perhaps the description backfires a bit, clothing the narrator as well. Describing a conversation in which Ford orders a drink and when the waiter brings it chastises him for bringing the wrong order, mistakes Aleister Crowley for Hilaire Belloc (and “cuts him dead”), and generally ruins the mellowness of the evening for the narrator, what are we to think? I had always avoided looking at Ford when I could and I always held my breath when I was near him in a closed room, but this was open air and fallen leaves blew along the sidewalks from my side of the table past his, so I took a good look at him, repented, and looked across the boulevard. The light was changed again and I had missed the change. I took a drink to see if his coming had fouled it, but it still tasted good.8 More openly critical and insulting than Jake ever was with Cohn, the narrator repents only about having looked at his companion. But what motivates this negative portrait? In making Ford look bad, doesn’t the narrator make himself look petty as well? It seems clear that the portrait of Ford is uncomplimentary to Ford who, according to the narrator, is a physical and social oaf. But the narrator also suffers. While the clumsy Ford seems concerned about the narrator, the narrator is only increasingly annoyed at Ford, especially when he says Americans cannot be gentlemen. The narrator is finally triumphant when Ford departs; another friend joins him and tells him that the man they had thought was Hilaire Belloc was really Aleister Crowley. But if character is the measure—if insight and human interest are what motivates such portraits—then what does the story gain from its representation of Ford other than an equally negative enactment of an intolerant and condescending narrator? Does a nasty narrator make us like Ford more? Are we tempted to quit reading the collection? Is the tone of the description



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of this encounter an unwitting revelation of the narrator/character’s lack of finesse? Or is it finally the finesse of yet again an envious soul who wants to demolish the competition? Not, of course, to be confused with the actual historical figure, Ernest Hemingway. In these texts that produce the illusion of a first-person narrator, the narrator’s complex tone anticipates and maybe even generates the narratives’ plots, sense of the potential relations among characters, and even the readers’ relations to the story. But it mostly redounds to the character enacted by the narrator as it narrates, defining, enacting its personality, characteristics, biases, and perspective.

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21 Dissonant Tones

Just as the complex tones of some of Ernest Hemingway’s firstperson narrators incite and motivate the intricacies of plot and character, so, too, do the tones of other, potentially unsympathetic, first-person narrators produce the imbroglios their narratives both elaborate and unwind. Dowell, the first-person narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, intones the character/ narrator primarily as a naive husband, presumably unaware of his wife’s persistent infidelities. The novel is simultaneously Dowell’s retrospective recounting of his coming-to-knowledge and the tale of his persisting ignorance.1 That the narrator enacts two opposing epistemologies produces the feeling that in his recollections/ rationalizations, Dowell is somehow not exactly rendering an accurate history of events. But, what narrator of fiction does render “accurately,” especially since both the events and the sense of a narrator are produced by the telling. The most acute sense of “accuracy” derives from the tonal performance of some credible verisimilitude. Perhaps in the end, The Good Soldier is less about the history of the four people involved in the affair and more about the narrator’s own process, not of coming to terms with what happened and his possible culpability, but with how to recount the tale to others so as to inculpate the players without appearing to do so under the guise of figuring out how to tell the tale at all. Setting the stage of the novel’s telling as a fireside chat between friends, Dowell begins the second chapter: “I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down—whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached me from

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the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.”2 Already absolving himself, at least in terms of the accuracy of facts and events, Dowell’s recounting of his process of how to recount comes after he has already begun narrating a first chapter in which he heaves regrets, characterizes the entanglements he has not yet rendered, and rues the effects of the history on himself, offering neither a tale “from the beginning” nor a rendition of information as he receives it. Instead, he begins his narrative with an inciting recital of ruined trust and innocence, outrage and infidelities, and the certain warning that no character involved ever means what he or she says. But most palpable is the narrator’s bitter tone of disappointment and betrayal. Despite Dowell’s evocation of the misdeeds and prevarications of others, the first chapter of the novel intones the narrator’s ultimate self-involvement. “Isn’t there any heaven,” the narrator asks, “where old beautiful dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn’t there any Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and everlasting souls?”3 Posing this hypothetical question about the possibility of a halcyon Eden, the narrator intones a combination of longing and regret, collapsing temporality—deep past and potential future—into a manifestation of his own disappointment. The “old,” and “beautiful,” repeated twice, is the site of potential “Nirvana,” and since what he is about to recount are memories, we might assume from this odic plaint that the past turned out not to be the “Nirvana” Dowell might, at the time, have believed it to have been. The narrator conveys this sense of hope and loss, this intoning of the tragic deprivation of a beatific reverie, as simultaneously a description of his sense of what the past had been and the dissolution of the dream that he currently recounts. It is and will be, as he declares in the first sentence, “the saddest story I have ever heard,”4 whether that sadness comes from the turns of events, a change in his perception of them, the ultimate fates of the characters—or all three. Immediately following his question about the survival of beauty, Dowell expostulates, “No, by God, it is false! It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison—a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.”5 Adamant and angry, Dowell’s response to his own question is the energetic denial of disillusion. He offers two visions: one golden,



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the other diabolical. His disappointment and anger match his capacity to envision a euphoric world. His telling intones both of them, together, producing what seems to be a shifting uncertainty, a sense of self-doubt, anger, disillusion, and the rendition of changing perceptions that lead some critics to call Dowell an “unreliable narrator.”6 If Dowell, as narrator, is produced by the telling and if this is fiction and none of this ever happened in the first place, how can the figment of a teller produced by the text be “unreliable?” The narrator’s tone enacts uncertainty, a sense of a before and after some shift in understanding, and a sense that events are not and never were what they seemed to be, tracing, presumably, his own processes of coming-to-knowledge. And the narrator appeals to the reader as if on a personal level after the first chapter’s apparent mourning: “Is all this digression or isn’t it digression? Again I don’t know. You, the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don’t tell me anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like.”7 Setting the stage for the confidences enabled by an interpersonal relation produces the sense of a persona in the narrator as an effect of his addressing the reader. The notion of the story as an oral telling—as something to be heard—also foregrounds the centrality of voice and tone as signals conveying the inexpressible sadness that accompanies the telling. As Dowell says at the beginning (again), this is “the saddest story I have ever heard,” suggesting that what cacophony of emotions we might audiate (or as listeners, hear)—sadness, mourning, regret, disillusion, purposelessness—is as much a part of the story as the history itself. But there is also more than that. Telling us he has a sad tone or that the story he is conveying is “sad,” diverts us from the telling’s other contributing tones: anger, betrayal, and even, perhaps, self-loathing. “Sad” is a cover for the telling’s temporal and motivational complexity. Dowell is an intrusive narrator in the sense that he often reverts to the circumstances that undergird his telling while he is telling: the imaginary of the listener sitting opposite, renditions of his feelings both at the time of events and in the present of the telling, issues with recounting the complexities of the story, problems of when he may have known what. The narrator’s attention to the telling as itself an aspect of the telling enacts a kind of tonal

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short-circuit. What Dowell recounts is himself recounting what others recounted to him, where according to his rendering, his response was ultimately this telling, this recounting of his impressions and the ways knowledge revised those impressions and how he feels about having both the lives around him and his illusions destroyed. And yet, too, there is joy in it all—joy in the recounting of pain and in recounting the recounting. For who, in the end, is “the good soldier”? Is the title an ironic reference to the false and weak Edward Ashburnham, who couldn’t resist his adulteries and, in the end, killed himself? Or is the good soldier the modest, unprepossessing man of leisure, Dowell, who withstood it all patiently, as everything he might have cared about was taken from him, but who survived it all with a story to tell? And in telling the story and revealing the weaknesses of his companions, does Dowell ultimately betray them? Or himself? Or is the narrative finally instructive about the misleading character of surfaces, of being too optimistic, of the dangers of being naive and kind, of believing in nobility while all the time encountering frailty? The mixed intonements of the telling host all of these questions, which not only arise in the telling but also define its complex tone, and at the same time seem to generate the tone which then appears to derive from the uncertainties of history and feeling, which raises questions about ouroboros.

Sympathizing with the Devil This cause-effect ouroboros of tone, telling, and motivation is encapsulated in tones of the self-indulgent nymphette lover, Humbert Humbert of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.8 Beginning the tome with a joyous ode to the teenaged object of his lust, Humbert coats his crimes with the ecstasies of desire: Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-Leeta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms, she was always Lolita.



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Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.9 This is a criminal confessing in ecstatic tones, palliating any sense of malefaction, shamelessly offering the readerly “ladies and gentlemen” a persona with whom one might sympathize, enacting the complexity of joy/desire/crime/lack of guilt that permeates the narrative, as well as producing in his narration the object of his desire as such. The narrator’s “fancy prose style” ranges from the tactile joys of phonetics to the nominal shifts in his beloved’s manifestations to the unapologetic revelation of the origins of his illicit passion to the final admission that it is all “a tangle of thorns.”10 The physical pleasures ensuing when speaking matches and produces desire, the fulfillments of repetition, Lo-Lee-Ta, the source of his sin was another such sin, the motivational ouroboros, cycling, already in the introductory prose. Even the syllables of the name track a narrative, starting low, ranging high, and ending, as the narrator suggests, with the punctuation of a tap on the teeth, a self-inflicted finality that marks the end of what is at the same time, a never-ending cycle. Although Humbert’s tone seems to enact a carefree joy, its culminating tap on the teeth—the tangle of thorns—also brings out what coexists with his apparent jubilation: a subtending tangle, the understatement of his matter-of-fact announcement that he is a murderer. What does it mean to have a happy killer? Or is he happy after all? While his playful cantation offers delight in the object of desire, is not that delight the brave and superficial glee that coats pain and maybe even regret? Might not the overly ecstatic tones of the beginning harbor a matching grief? The narrator intones both at once, the ecstasy seemingly impossible in light of his crimes, yet his crimes somehow necessitated by his ecstasy. They are together, circling in and through one another.11 The effect of this superlative duplicity is not the sense that the narrator is lying or fabricating, but that the narration itself enacts the complexity of his feelings. In this sense, the narration’s tone performs a persona who bravely covers his pathos, who is willing to

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own his crimes, but who prefers a focus on love rather than death, on motivation instead of crime. But his bitterness, too, seeps through, bitterness at himself, at the pattern of things that define themselves before he has a chance to choose, at his perverse desire to have what he shouldn’t and to have what will never long retain the youth and innocence that attracts him. He sets out, he tells us at the novel’s end, to tell his story, to chronicle his desire that drove beyond the bounds of rationality. “This then is my story,” he summarizes in the fourth paragraph from the novel’s end. “I have reread it. It has bits of marrow sticking to it, and blood, and beautiful bright-green flies. At this or that twist of it I feel my slippery self eluding me, gliding into deeper and darker waters than I care to probe. I have camouflaged what I could so as not to hurt people.”12 A narrator whose narration produces a complex character/ narrator, a slippery voice with opalescent tones that shift and meld virtue and vice, art and excess, love and death becomes, despite his loathsome actions, a vivid multidimensional persona. His complex tone achieves it all, ranging from the “bright-green” flies that hover over the corpse to the “deeper and darker waters” he prefers to ignore, and offers, perhaps ironically, a most vivid imaginary teller with whom readers can identify and even sympathize. The tone enacts the story and the tone is the product of a verbal virtuosity.

22 Toning Up/Toning Down

When I was in a Waterstone’s bookstore on the Spui in Amsterdam in 1992, I purchased a novel by an author about whom I knew nothing. Something about the way Waterstone’s displays their books and offers “3 books for the price of 2” specials encourages this sort of random acquisition. Usually, I have at least heard of the authors of the books I buy, usually contemporary British novels by Stephen Fry, Michael Frayn, Salman Rushdie (unless they are ambitiously thick), or even Dawn French. Clearly, there is some mix of influences in these selections—popular culture meets reputation meets the work of a playwright who also writes novels or vice versa. I rarely premise these chance procurements on literary criteria, always perceiving Waterstone’s books as recreational reading. So it was a little unusual that one of these casual purchases became a classroom staple, precisely because of the personable tone through which its first-person narrator enacts its teenage protagonist. Karim Amir, the seventeen-year-old “Englishman born and bred,” is the protagonist of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.1 Karim’s tone enacts an open, friendly persona who evinces excitement over things to come, a quality that incites the same effect in students who read it. The narrator’s lively, yet vulnerable tone ignites a desire to read. I teach this novel because its likable protagonist pushes back against simplistic assumptions about identity; his growing pains, perceptions of the stream of idiosyncratic characters he encounters, and renditions of the many different possible life styles in 1970s London open up, startle, and entertain. Like our other first-person narrator/characters, Karim’s tone is layered and complex, a multiplicity he prepares us for at the tale’s commencement by noting his mixed background: “My name is

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Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories.”2 “Almost” an Englishman, nothing is quite as stolid as it might be, even though Karim begins with the trite “born and bred” at the start. As he continues, his “born and bred” becomes almost a caricature as the circumstances of his breeding are not quite what one usually means by that stock phrase. What might have seemed solid becomes another “almost,” forged by hybridity instead of the ostensible purity of a single history. “But,” Karim continues, “I don’t care— Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere.”3 He is and he isn’t. He is an Englishman, having declared the fact twice (almost an overcompensation). But he is not quite. Not only does he derive from “two old histories”; he lives in the suburbs of South London; and he is “not proud” of being the Englishman he insists he is. He is also a teenager, another state of not quite-ness: Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. Or perhaps it was being brought up in the suburbs that did it. Anyway, why search the inner room when it’s enough to say that I was looking for trouble, any kind of movement, action and sexual interest I could find, because things were so gloomy, so slow and heavy, in our family, I don’t know why. Quite frankly, it was all getting me down and I was ready for anything.4 A confiding narrator who conveys the honest here-and-nowhere angst of a teenager between worlds, classes, atmospheres, and even parts of London, Karim’s opening narration is tonally matter-offact, equitable, informative in its retrospection. It enacts the paradox of a balanced portrait of an off-kilter teen, a young man both in and between cultures and sexualities, clothing his incipient rebellions with thoughtful consideration of their causes. We know what will happen; Karim’s tone resounds unrest coated with calm logic. His reasonable take on the “action” to come prepares us not only for almost anything; it enlists us as sympathetic recipients of whatever will happen. We already know by the way the intro has intoned the persona of Karim that we can trust him to survive whatever he



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encounters and to narrate it as equitably as the character the telling has enacted can. Despite his South London suburban origin, Karim, whose father is a Pakistani immigrant “Civil Service clerk” (but who also came from a high social status in his native country) and whose mother is an unhappy English woman who works in a shoe shop, encounters an esoteric blend of personalities.5 As his father takes on the role of guru in “Oriental Philosophy” to a group of wealthy, trend-setting suburban Londoners, Karim, who accompanies him, meets his father’s new friends, including the energetic, entrepreneurial Eva, who hosts the guru and with whom Karim’s father has an affair; and her son Charlie, who becomes a rock star, and with whom Karim is briefly in love. These join with family friends and relatives, including his father’s best childhood friend, Anwar; Anwar’s wife, Jeeta; their daughter, Jamila (with whom Karim occasionally dallies); Jamila’s imported arranged-marriage spouse, Changez; Karim’s mother’s cranky sister, Jean, and more obliging husband, Ted. And then there are the members of the theatre company with whom Karim eventually performs, as idiosyncratic as might be expected. As Karim encounters and takes all of this in, his desire seems simultaneously to define the choices he makes and at the same time be thwarted by almost any self-affirming step he takes.6 Accompanying his father to Eva’s house for his lectures, Karim, who has dressed in an extreme version of a 70s mod style, is excited not only to experience a different part of London but also to experience people whose main concern is something other than merely trying to survive a humdrum existence. As he is relieving himself in Eva’s bathroom, he has an epiphany: I had an extraordinary revelation. I could see my life clearly for the first time: the future and what I wanted to do. I wanted to live always this intensely: mysticism, alcohol, sexual promise, clever people and drugs. I hadn’t come upon it all like this before, and now I wanted nothing else. The door to the future had opened: I could see which way to go.7 The first “way to go” turns out to be Eva’s son, Charlie. “And Charlie,” Karim says, “My love for him was unusual as love goes: it was not generous. I admired him more than anyone but I didn’t

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wish him well. It was that I preferred him to me and wanted to be him. I coveted his talents, face, style. I wanted to wake up with them all transferred to me.”8 As his actions match his desires, the narrative intones a reasoned distance not only on the evolution of attitudes and desires but also on the choices Karim makes. He is simultaneously open to everything—to sex with Charlie and Jamila, to acting, to being and not being the token Pakistani, to helping his father when his father leaves his mother and to helping his mother. At the same time, envy and thwarted desire linger, motivating him, although his capacity to recognize these traits for what they are also enables him to put them aside. Unlike Humbert Humbert, Karim, as narrator/character elicits sympathy from the start, a sympathy that suspends judgment through Karim’s coming-of-age trials. Karim’s telling enacts an inviting tone that performs the account of a character who is a sensible adventurer, a product of his time and circumstances, and finally as a multidimensional persona comprised of various traceable traits, who nonetheless demonstrates how his inherent multiplicity makes him a winsome and attractive persona. The tone that produces this sense of narrating character offers the reader a friend and confidant about whom we quickly come to care, even (or because of) his adventurous self-contradictions. Karim is a narrator/character who reliably intones the unreliability of a curious and bored teen.

Intoning Emptiness The Buddha of Suburbia is a mainstream novel about characters, many of whom are not mainstream at all—immigrant Pakistanis, fringe performers, rock stars, and free-spirited mavens. Its conventional approach to the nonconventional both pushes back against norms (in terms of Karim’s experiences) and acquiesces to mainstream literary styles. Even when the first-person narrator/ character may not be such a sympathetic persona, other aspects of the character’s narration may compensate—Humbert’s “fancy prose,” Dowell’s perennial confusion. First-person narrator/ characters, however, can also work against convention, enacting accounts that counter and bring into question assumptions about conventional narratives, that produce narratives that push the



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reader out, invite and/or force the consumption of a different mode of recounting, and sometimes put readers off altogether. Such is Kathy Acker’s I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac Imagining, a novella with a first-person narrator who calls herself “Kathy Acker,” but who intones emptiness.9 Part of the rationale for the narrator’s tone is that the account itself is a series of dreams, each of which repeats itself multiply. But the tone of the narration evacuates personality, character, individuality, and finally much sense of tone itself, instead of building a persona. The narrative’s compulsive repetitions, though seeming to try to recapture what they lose, lose whatever that is all the more. I couldn’t even figure out how to make any money. I didn’t. I became poor and had to find a way of justifying my lousy attitude about money. At first, like all poor people, I had delusions about being a great artist, but that quickly passed. I never did have any talent. I want to fuck these two fantastic artists even though I’m not an artist: that’s what this is all about. This is the only way I can get them: (I only want them for a few hours. Days.) Jewels hang from the tips of silver branches. I also want money. My name is Kathy Acker.10 Evincing no sympathy, no desire, the narrator conveys merely an instinct for survival. But that instinct is specific. Artists, an identity she cannot have, become her prey. She wants them not for themselves but because they are artists and they have money. The self she might have is on the block; she is willing to trade without hesitation. The narrator’s evocation of the author’s name at the end of this declaration, though it might be a move to secure the persona that absents itself, works more to raise a question about the emptiness of the author function. After her two sexual encounters with artists, the narrator declares, in implied opposition to the confessional practices of other first-person narratives: “I had no background. I’m not giving you details about myself because these two occurrences are the first events of my life. Otherwise I don’t exist: I’m a mirror for beauty.”11 Unlike Karim, “Kathy Acker” offers no account that might begin to ground a persona. But then, there is no persona to ground. The tone of the narration is one of subtraction, of taking away all cues,

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insights, habits, and idiosyncrasies that would fill out, individualize, intone the sense of a speaking consciousness. There is no persona, merely a vacuum, an empty space, echoing, like the “mirror” she is, beauty, if what the text achieves is beauty of a sort. The recounted dreams repeat, slightly rearranged, the same sentences, the same voice that persistently drains itself of any sense of a persona, whose tone is flat, empty. Language enacts tone; one tone it can enact is a tone that lacks feeling, that lacks much more than a bare sense of a vague consciousness lingering somewhere, speaking in a dream. The novella itself enacts the vision of a narrative premised upon the reveries of an empty soul, a past-tense person whose existence can only be said to be past. It is not present except as a remnant, a lingering sense of someone who might once have been there somewhere. It is the tonal trace of a tone that exists in the text as a bare echo. The epigram that prefaces the novella suggests a scenario about art itself: “This is very non-political, therefore reactionary,” he said. “But what would the world have to be like for these events to exist?” I replied.12 Situated as a dream, the narration offers not an alternate world but the world of the alternate, enacting an existence that is always the coming-into-being of a being who never has been. Compared with Karim, who recounts a very different version of this cominginto-being, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining enacts a diegesis in which art brings beings into existence to the degree to which it makes them disappear. Short-circuiting the ouroboros of the writer/character/narrator who intones himself as writer/ character/narrator, this novella unhinges the loops, separating voice from persona, even as it seems to produce a persona-less voice, a speaker whose tone is flat, whose tone is produced by a persistent stream of denials: “I am not an artist”; “I don’t exist.” Art undoes the artist/narrator who was never an artist in the first place and only becomes one as she narrates how she is not one and only comes into a fleeting consciousness when she proclaims her nonexistence. Here again is the ouroboros, this time in the negative, as the undoing of an undoing instead of the doing of the doing of the doing. If tone can enact a persona that maps in its complex layers the events of a narrative, so, too, can it produce a flat voice, absent in its presence.



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I have also tried to use I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining in the classroom, but only in those classes about avantgarde art or postmodern practices. It is easier to get students to see how the novella might be countercultural, experimental, pushing the boundaries of narrative, etc., then it is to get them actually to read the novel past the first few pages. To do so would mean to take up, curiously, the same self-evacuative processes as the narrator, to cease to exist as the recipient of the production of a persona, and few students can manage that with anything more than vague intellectual enthusiasm.

23 Tone-ads

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.1 So commences Edward Bernays’s 1928 tome, Propaganda.2 Throughout his account of the mechanisms by which public media both enable democracy and control “the masses,” Bernays’s tone is even, fair. If there is a slight sense of a warning about the presence of covert control, it comes in the form of the passive verbs, such as those that appear above in the study’s opening to describe the effects of the “manipulation” of this “unseen mechanism of society” on the rest of us who populate the “masses.”3 He briefly maps the evolution of this manipulative force as royal hierarchies became democracies: The people actually gained power which the king lost. For economic power tends to draw after it political power; and the history of the industrial revolution shows how the power passed from the king and the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie. Universal suffrage and universal schooling reinforced this tendency, and at last even the bourgeoisie stood in fear of the common people. For the masses promised to become king.4

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Casting the processes of political empowerment as the natural effects of shifts in the economy and modes of production as well as of the enlargement of educational opportunities, Bernays’s study envisions the social as subject to an evolution that inevitably depends upon controlling the masses without their being aware, not of the control but of its mechanisms. With the advent of mass media (Bernays quotes H. G. Wells’s more optimistic account from The New York Times), such media become the means by which powerful forces can control public opinion. Bernays is more dubious than Wells, who sees these media as positive forces, as this passage Bernays quotes from Wells suggests: Modern means of communication—the power afforded by print, telephone, the wireless and so forth, of rapidly putting through directive strategies of technical conceptions to a great number of cooperating centers, of getting quick replies and effective discussion—have opened up a new world of political processes. Ideas and phrases can now be given an effectiveness greater than the effectiveness of any personality and stronger than any sectional interest. The common design can be documented and sustained against perversion and betrayal. It can be elaborated and developed steadily and widely without personal, local and sectional misunderstanding.5 Bernays extends Wells’s analysis of media power to the realms “of commercial and social processes and all manifestations of mass activity”;6 and although he seems to see this capability as a positive mechanism in democratic society, he soon casts doubt upon the entirely felicitous possibilities of mass media. In the second chapter, Bernays declares that there has been a crucial shift: Today, however, a reaction has set in. The minority has discovered a powerful help in influencing majorities. It has been found possible so to mold the mind of the masses that they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction. In the present structure of society, this practice is inevitable. Whatever of social importance is done today, whether in politics, finance, manufacture, agriculture, charity, education, or other fields, must be done with the help of propaganda. Propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.7

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That Bernays (and Wells) both deploy mainly passive voice verbs in their analyses not only replicates the processes they are discussing, imitating the dynamic of agentless reception propaganda produces, but also removes propaganda’s operators from the danger of conscious apprehension. Somewhere, people—“men we have never heard of”—are controlling what we see and hear. This propaganda is not simply persuasive rhetoric; it is also control of whatever appears in the media itself. Not only are the masses passive recipients of messages designed by an unknown “minority,” but they also passively receive only what is in the interests of that minority to pass on. Apart from the dominance of passive voice and its potential mirroring of the topic and Bernays’s remarkable attempt to offer an evenhanded description of the propaganda phenomenon, what possibilities are there for tone in a phenomenon in which passive recipients receive limited versions of messages that inform them about whatever is in the interest of some hidden, controlling minority? Bernays takes that issue on as well. Quoting four headlines from The New York Times on the day he is writing the second chapter of his book, Bernays notes that several of these headlines include their authorizing source, and all perform the act of making a state of affairs public. “twelve nations warn china real reform must come before they give relief.” “pritchett reports zionism will fail” “realty men demand a transit inquiry” “our living standard highest in history, says hoover report” Apart from the irony that Bernays wrote this book in the late 1920s, the point he makes is that all of these headlines seem to present “accounts of spontaneous happenings,” news announced as it happens. That the first of the four represents the view of the State Department makes “what it says . . . less important than what it is.”8 As the State Department’s position, the declaration is, therefore, acceptable on its face. This combination of statement and source offers an example of what Bernays calls “propaganda”—a

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statement that no one would think to question. The second headline, credited to “Pritchett,” is also backed by the “Carnegie Foundation,” as Bernays suggests, “so the public would hear and believe” anti-Zionist propaganda. All are, as Bernays points out, “attempts to influence public opinion”9—and to go further, they do so not only by linking themselves either to government agencies or experts but also by enacting declarative statements with modal verbs such as “must” and “will,” the superlative “highest” and the superlative connotating “demand.” The tone of these headlines enacts finality, the highest point, the most definitive, the condition about which we need not think any further. The headlines are, in a sense, commands, conclusions, givens stated in such a way that they foreclose any question from the start. This propaganda, as Bernays notes, “is a continuous, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group,”10 And although he suggests as well that his “examples are not given to create the impression that there is anything sinister about propaganda,” Bernays’s presentation, in fact, unclothes propaganda without itself offering more propaganda. The tone of propaganda is certain, definitive, curt, and performative in that its pronouncement tonally certifies the “truth” of its pronouncement, foreclosing questions. There is no uncertainty in propaganda; it is the way to think, to see things, to apperceive the world and one’s relation to it. In the end propaganda’s pronouncements produce (and reproduce) the same active/passive power structure that enabled the production of such messages in the first place: “we” (an unknown “minority”) pronounce a truth. Economic assertions that combine modal verbs guaranteeing the certainty of the pronouncement with authoritative sources intone as commands, proclamations, from those who rightfully know. There is no room for doubt, rumination, uncertainty. It is what it is. Bernays’s analysis of propaganda envisions it as policy, as the means of establishing governing norms in the interest of whoever has control of the media. There is no sense that the recipients of propaganda should have enough facts or opinions to make up their own minds. Even with the stock market crash of 1929, news headlines simply declared, “market bottom reached” or “stocks shrink to 10 millions,” and the more hopeful “frantic stampede on market checked,” and “stock prices rally sharply.”11

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Persuasive Intoning

Back When They Thought They Had to Convince the Consumer (And what tone was that?) Even though “the minority” was shaping public perceptions of policies and events through declarative, authoritarian statements, corporations selling products to the public took a gentler approach, offering consumers seductive sales pitches intoning luxury, happiness, excitement, and resolution. Magazine advertisements in the 1950s and 1960s, for example, generally consisted of at least three short paragraphs of product description that evinced loving artistry, sensual pleasure, and not-so-subtle persuasive tactics. Advertisements, thus, appeared to offer consumers a choice—and not only a choice, the luxury of a wealth of pertinent information to help make that choice. Though clearly attempts to entice consumers (the ads emanate a seductive tone), they appear to offer readers a chance to ponder and compare, while also suggesting that consumers are the very center of the advertiser’s interest. From page 9 of Life Magazine, October 8, 1956: On the left side:

Perma-lift’s exciting new bareback bra Happy days ahead—no more twisting, turning, straining to fasten those exasperating back hooks. Your new molding, uplifting “Permalift”* Long-Line Bra hooks in front, quick as a wink, and the sly, shy little hooks simply can’t show, even through your sheerest dresses. Look how daringly low it fits in back, too—ideal for all your chic new bareback fashions. And the exclusive Criss-Cross** design keeps it as securely and snugly in place as a bra with a conventional high back. You’ll love it for its convenience and wonderful easy comfort. Be fitted today in the style that’s perfect for your new fashions. On the right side, in larger font, beside the text above: HOOKS In FRONT so quick, so easy”

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And finally, a small box hanging above, below the full-page advertisement’s image of three women’s bodies, the center figure of a brassiered woman’s torso facing forward and the two women’s figures on each side with their backs forward, curiously with bouquets of flowers in the place of their heads. The box centers yet another jingle: “Perma-lift Brassieres THE LIFT THAT NEVER LETS YOU DOWN”12 Underneath the tripartite image (which inhabits two-thirds of the full two pages) resides the text as in many magazine ads of this era. Even offering text to read seems unlikely today, five decades later, but this text is as luxuriant as the product it is flogging. Adjectives—“exciting,” “exasperating,” “molding,” “uplifting,” “sly,” “shy,” “chic” “wonderful,” “easy”—gloss the product description with a patina of enthusiasm as well as a tone of confidentiality—of we girls talking among ourselves. The tone of the ad is personal, deploying second-person pronouns and seeming both to recognize and to acknowledge long-standing issues with brassieres. “No more twisting,” no more “straining”: we understand your dilemma and we offer you an alternative. Basically, we are on your side, and wish to make your beauteous life more comfortable with our product. The ad’s appeal to the personal peppered with adjectives that extend the text and that offer a rather cunning image of hooks and eyes—“the sly, shy little hooks”—seems to share personal experience, to offer a considerate contrast to authoritarian headlines, to focus as much on the consumer as on the product, making its sales pitch seem like a more humanitarian offer of relief than the attempt to sell underwear. The two slogan bits that appear earlier and to the side are much more obviously advertising tactics that link the product with a catchy line: “The lift that never lets you down.” We are much more familiar with these economic slogans, whose brief catchphrases attach qualities to products that persist beyond any consideration. These are more like what Bernays envisions as propaganda—associations that brook no question, that assert what seems to be a given. The same consumer-centered discourse in another magazine ad selling a less “personal” item, a “Maytag Automatic Washer,” reads:

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Haven’t you ever wished for an automatic that gives everything you wash the same gentle care your own hands do? Now there is. The new Maytag All-Fabric Automatic is almost human in the way it adjusts to the job. You just push buttons. It controls the amount of water, the temperature (from hot to cold), and gives you a choice of washing speeds, handles delicate things gently, yet gets heavy wash Maytag-clean (which, as Mother will tell you, is the cleanest there is). With the new Maytag Automatic, you save as you wash. Over the years, you will get back in savings what you paid. In one year, for instance, you save up to 26 boxes of soap powder, up to 2500 gallons of hot water and, biggest saving of all, your clothes will last longer.13 Like the brassiere ad, this ad also intones shared experience and friendship, and even more, real concern for the consumer’s finances. While seeming to focus on the consumer’s time, it deploys italics to emphasize its own extraordinary qualities—“Maytag clean,” “human.” “You” simply push a button and the machine does it all for you. The ad’s headline catchphrase—“Wash these problems right out of your life!”—also focuses on the ways the product makes the consumer’s life easier, solving problems “(with new pushbutton ease).” Like the Perma-lift ad, the Maytag ad fills the page with images: panels illustrating clothing issues, the product, a box listing the washer’s features, and two sub-headlines that, as in the Perma-lift ad, offer catchy slogans that associate the product with qualities. The Maytag ad also evokes one authority, perhaps almost tonguein-cheek: “yet gets heavy wash Maytag-clean (which, as Mother will tell you, is the cleanest there is).” “Mother,” the authority, guarantees Maytag quality in traces of propagandistic practice, but in the tones of familiar, familial duties such as doing laundry—and more important, implying that Maytag is a reliable product that has been around since your mother’s day. The tone of the discourse is warm, friendly, consumer-focused, concerned about economy and ease-of-use—and is telling us why. These ads enact a persuasive rhetoric, which implies that the consumer is a co-equal subject capable of reasoned choice—even if the ads are heavy-handed and clearly deploying familiar advertising tropes. The tones of the ads both match advertisers’ estimations of

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the consumers’ interest in the product and at the same time produce that interest. Deploying headlines, images, block slogans, and several paragraphs of prose text, the magazine ads from the mid1950s enact a tone of seductive display, appealing to the consumer they produce.14

Let Us Tell You Both the Perma-lift and the Maytag ads appear in the front few pages of Life. They are black and white, text and image, and they appeal to issues of convenience presumably of importance primarily to a female audience. The middle of the magazine contains ads with color images, and in these ads the images become more prominent. But some ads also use a very different mode of persuasion: “science.” One example is an ad for Domino sugar which claims in its headline: “domino sugar is low in calories, high in energy!” Below the headline are three paragraphs of prose, followed by another slogan: “Lift Up Your Energy—Hold Down Your Weight the Modern Way with Domino!” The prose text intones an implied argument: Nutritionists know there’s no need to go on a ‘sugar-starved’ diet to keep weight down . . . In fact, it can be actually harmful to deny yourself the energy of Domino Sugar! And yet, there are only 18 calories in a teaspoon of Domino Sugar. That’s fewer calories than in many “reducing diet” foods such as pears, grapefruit, tomatoes. Just as these foods are famous for their health values, in a well-balanced diet Domino Sugar helps supply the quick food energy you need every day for good health. So don’t deny yourself the delicious extra flavor Domino Sugar adds to every meal.”15 Hey dieters!!! Sugar isn’t bad, no matter what anyone else says. Nutritionists will tell you that you don’t need to deprive yourself of sugar. The ad uses the word “sugar-starved” which elicits connotations having less to do with sugar than with conditions dieters fear in general. Sugar gives you “quick food energy.” Sugar is, thus, “food.” Like all food it has calories, but not as many as you might think (in relation to sugar’s implied condemnation by some unseen diet critics somewhere). And here is the caloric information.

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See, pears and tomatoes have more calories. And anyway those diet foods don’t have as much flavor as Domino sugar! Addressing the absent, but proliferated “scientific” discourses about nutrition and weight loss, the Domino sugar ad combats them with facts of its own. A side panel picture of a pear sitting underneath three full teaspoons of sugar hovering above asks: “which is less fattening? 3 teaspoons of Domino Sugar contain fewer calories than 1 fresh pear!” Evoking experts, the ad comes much closer to Bernays’s notion of propaganda as it announces, as fait accompli, “facts” backed by “nutritionists.” Appearing to offer useful information (3 teaspoons of sugar have fewer calories than one fresh pear), the ad presents its caloric case. It implies a consumer audience that only wishes to do the best for itself given the state of knowledge about nutrition. While appearing to appeal to reason, however, the ad’s focus on calories sidesteps the whole picture, presenting issues of dietary value only in terms of calories. Three teaspoons of sugar have only 54 calories. A pear has 95. You see what we mean? No mention of what other nutrients pears might have that sugar doesn’t. The tone of the informative ad (or the ad that tries to sell based on its performance of an informative tone presenting facts) also enacts a corrective tone by implication. Hey, consumers, you may have been told one thing, but here is the truth! With this information, you can make better choices. The ad’s calorie focus delimits context, offering, like the headlines Bernays cites earlier, what appears to be a dispositive pronouncement about the value of sugar. Instead of seducing with the prose of a confidante or maternal helper, the sugar ad informs in much the same way that Bernays’s examples of propagandistic headlines declare. This informative tone that occults opposition also appears in another ad that appears on page 12 of this issue of Life, still in the bundle of advertisements that preface the magazine’s content. This ad offers a black-and-white drawing of an empty rural road with a large metallic dome to one side; the image fills two-thirds of the page. Under the image is the headline “How the atom is putting new shapes on the horizon.” Sponsored by “America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies,” the ad’s text occupies the bottom third of the page: In a few years, shapes like these on the horizon may well be trademarks of the atomic age. Trademarks of the atom at peaceful work—producing electricity for the nation’s homes, farms, factories and businesses.

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Already, America’s independent electric companies are participating in building three big commercial atomic-electric power plants. Four more such plants are under way. All told, more than 300 million dollars from the electric company engineers and scientists are pressing research into all aspects of this vast new field. There is still much to be learned about making the atom work efficiently and economically for you. And the experience, ingenuity and inventiveness of the independent electric companies are at work with other industries and with the Atomic Energy Commission to find the answers. America’s electric light and power companies have brought electricity to almost every corner of the U.S. in the span of a single lifetime. You can be sure they will help develop the atom’s promise so that this nation will continue to have the best and the most electric service in the world.16 Informative and defensive at the same time, this ad functions as a way to fend off criticism. Its tone is slightly defensive: look we are building plants, and even better, we are still doing research into how this works! We are investing money and personnel in this research so we can “find the answers.” Don’t be afraid of the science-fictionshaped building we have presented earlier, marring an otherwise peaceful, bucolic scene. This is just a “new shape.” It is akin to a “trademark,” a term that appears twice in the first paragraph. “Trademark” connotes proprietary interests. The landscape will be filled with marks of our proprietary interest, but fear not. It is all there to provide you with great electric service. No mention of expense (other than the companies’ investment). No mention of the dangers of such plants. Just the promise of “the best and the most electric service in the world.” This is a “service.” This ad is entirely propaganda, as Bernays defines it. We, the electric companies, will be serving you with energy from nuclear plants whose structures will mar the landscape, but get used to them. We don’t even need to declare that this is a good thing. We endorse it by putting 300 million dollars into it. Building these plants is already happening, and there is more to come. We are doing this for you, so you can have plenty of electric power. And that power is good! And look how far-seeing we are. The earnest, almost anxious tone of the ad, signaled by its attention to continuing research and the obviously incomplete state of knowledge, also suggests that there has already been

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opposition to the construction of “atomic-electric power plants.” In fact, the previous week’s issue of Life included an article “On the Construction of a Future Source of Power—The First Large-Scale, Commercial Power Plant at Shippingport, Pa.”17 The issue bearing this ad from “America’s Independent Electric Light and Power Companies” also includes a sequel to the previous issue’s article, titled, “Atomic Fusion, Not Fission, Will Drive Future Machines.”18 Adapted from the book, Atoms and People by Ralph E. Lapp, this essay describes the research that has been done on nuclear fission as a “great source of power for the future.” Discussing the serious problems with nuclear fission plants—the production of “dirty” ash, the toxicity and radiation from split uranium atoms, the hazards associated with handling expended fuel rods, and the problems with safely disposing of them, this article proposes nuclear “fusion”—“the joining together of light atoms” such as hydrogen, as a better alternative. But, the article continues, no one knows about this safer version, even its existence has been hidden, until recently, when Indian physicist, Homi Bhabha, announced the possibilities of a clean nuclear energy to be gained from fusion. So 165 pages after the Electric companies’ pronuclear fission ad, the same issue of Life includes an essay that suggests there is possibly a better way to provide nuclear energy. Fission or fusion? The article, which depends entirely upon expert commentary, becomes the opponent of what the electric companies are trying to sell on page 12. There is indeed a minor tussle occurring here, propaganda in the form of competing assertions by businesses and scientists about the possibilities of technologies that have not yet really even been developed. What becomes visible in this issue of Life is the underlying debate about nuclear energy in the mid-1950s. Exposing the disagreements and lack of real knowledge about nuclear energy renders the Electric companies’ ad much more a chunk of propaganda than the benign informative moment it tries to appear to be. Its propaganda is unclothed; its informative tone becomes a somewhat redundant and overly insistent attempt to persuade. The ad’s context, thus, becomes a part of how tone can change depending on the assumptions a consumer might have when reading it. Although detached from one another by more than 100 pages, the ad’s attempt to persuade becomes visible as such once readers reach the article on atomic fusion. The ad’s self-contradictions (announcing research even as the plants are already under construction), betray an anxiety about

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the public’s acceptance of the new technology. The ad’s potentially shifting tone undermines its propagandistic functions as it exposes the pleading instead of the authoritarian tone propaganda deploys. The tones of these ads, hence, are themselves layered and liable to shift, depending on context, the knowledge of the reader, and exposure to advertising discourse. The ads take time: time to read, time to sort out the multiple headlines, slogans, and images. They are designed for print media which readers can peruse, perhaps repeatedly. The temporality of their intonements is a certain leisure, as the ads exist before, between and after the magazine’s feature articles, even though the ads are as graphically exciting and more plentiful than photo essays about a boy genius going to Harvard, the potentials of Syracuse University football player Jim Brown, the death of athlete Babe Diedricksen Zacharias, a large feature on Freemasonry, an article on Eisenhower’s cabinet organization, and the essay on atomic energy.

Boss Tones Now: For More Info With the internet, time becomes a measurable dimension. Different ads can occupy the same space serially, so that how long an ad is visible becomes an element of a website’s income. Hence, contemporary internet ads are brief and imperative. No longer is there really any acknowledgment of consumers’ capacity to make informed decisions. The ads now seem like commands (much in keeping with the definitive tones of Bernays’s propaganda). Alongside the USA Today crossword puzzle on the USA Today website have appeared the following flashing small boxed ads:19

“Snack well and save big” WALGREENS Get our app

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“Powering your business Is our business” TXU ENERGY GET QUOTE➭

“A better way to hunt for the Most Favorable fill price Walk Limit” By SCHWAB KNOW MORE➧

199/mo. 36 mos. lease $2,999 Due at Signing See lease details 2018 Corolla LE Toyota SEE OFFER➪

Three of the four ads mentioned previously offer concise imperatives or definitive statements, accompanied by a graphic and a box with an arrow commanding the consumer to get more information by clicking a box or an arrow, which will take the consumer to another website, the choice tracked by anyone and everything that gathers consumer information on the web. Only

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the Toyota ad offers its information up front as itself the statement, with an arrow leading to the entire lease offer. Three paragraphs of seductive or informative discourse have become imperative statements—and statements which intone like headlines, like the propaganda Bernays describes. Print ads that still appear in magazines and newspapers continue some of the same mid-century practice of textual description dominated by images, but some of that description has turned into personal testimony. Consumers have become a part of the ads. For example, the penultimate ad in the October 2010 issue of National Geographic includes only presumably a car owner’s own photographs of her new Toyota and a printed “handwritten” note expressing her feelings about the car.20 Other full-page ads in the issue over-fill the pages with small print, with only their headlines snagging readers—“Get the Emergency World Radio FREE.”21 But even in this print magazine, many of the ads have taken on the economical imperative tones of internet ads and, oh, yes, propaganda. The back cover of National Geographic has only one line: “Introducing FaceTime video calling. Smile.” This combines information and command, even if the command connotes a history of photographic posings. The upper part of the page features images of two cell phones, one of a broadly smiling man. The two-page ad immediately inside the front cover offers a two-page photograph of the front end of a Jeep, with three short proclamations: “PLASTIC CANNOT BE FORGED.” “THIS IS THE 2011 GRAND CHEROKEE.” “JEEP. THE THINGS WE MAKE, MAKE US.” Like Bernays’s propagandistic headlines, the tone of these three statements is one that brooks no dissent. The relevance of claiming that plastic is unforgeable in a car ad is, however, a bit puzzling. Is the Jeep made of plastic? Did it used to be? Are other cars made of plastic? And what are we to make of the somewhat mystic pronouncement cum brand slogan, “The things we make, make us”? The things Jeep makes make Jeep what it is? Isn’t that stating the obvious? Or is the slogan meant to be more general, more of mysterious philosophical moebius about what goes around comes around?

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The two-page ad on pages 5 and 6 of this issue of National Geographic best illustrates more contemporary propagandistic intonement through its repetition of statements that declare that medical care is superior if the provider is working with huge numbers. Across the ad, just below the halfway point on the page and underneath a graphic image of large flat hands and fingers coming together, superinscribed with what appear to be bright floating numbers, is a line of declarations: United Healthcare knowledge in numbers. strength in numbers. comfort in numbers. health in numbers. humanity in numbers. power in numbers

If it is not clear from the mantric repetitions, United Healthcare declares that health care is better if there is a huge number of patients. A very fine print text at the top of the page offers an acknowledgment that patients would like services, and that because they are so big they have more doctors and services to connect “you” (and the entire text addresses “you” the patient/ consumer”) with the following possibilities:

To be treated fairly. To know that when it comes to your health care it is okay to have questions. To know that they will be answered thoughtfully. To have health care that is simpler, more responsive, more caring. At United Healthcare, we use information from across the health care system to innovate. To create programs that help connect you to the right doctors. To support you through your toughest medical decisions. We are 78,000 people looking out for 70 million Americans. And we are using information, data, and numbers to achieve one important goal: treating you like a human being. That’s HEALTH IN NUMBERS.

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Like the ads from the 1956 Life, this text’s repetitions and overemphasis on what “numbers” can do intones as defensive, as an answer to criticism of impersonality, losing patients in a system, and, well, treating patients like numbers. The defensive tone of this ad in the guise of numerical advantage hits what one might imagine are the basic complaints occasioned by working with a giant health care system. This defensiveness combined with the simple assertion of superiority again intones like propaganda. We have turned all of the bases of your complaints into numerical positives. Sadly, perhaps ironically, in this ad one gets lost in the numbers—in the repetitions themselves. As Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky declare in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, “The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of larger society.”22 The tone by which the media accomplish this is and has been the imperative, dispositive assumption of authority proclamation of the headline, the slogan, and the command. Although there has been a shift away from persuasive discourse in parts of advertising texts such as was evident in the 1950s, the assertions of the headline and its tone of certainty have become more pervasive, in part thanks to the shift from print to electronically conveyed text in which the time of reading itself becomes a commodity. What had been economical to fit the width of a newspaper page has added another curt dimension and with that truncation, ads currently enact a tone even more bossy and commanding than before. Pretending to offer consumers some choice (hey, press the “more info” arrow), these internet ads and their print imitators are more dismissive, more imperative, and treat the consumer as even less aware than sixty years ago, as well as putting the consumer in service even of their own advertisement (Click for more). Much of this has to do with the retreat of language. And language is the generator of tone. Some of this has become a question of what owns whom—somehow the internet can now command.

24 Robo-tone

The robot said: “There is a water supply and plumbing. Food will be supplied. You will have viewing matter. The ports are controlled from this panel. They are closed now but if you wish to view space—” Baley said with some agitation, “That’s all right, boy. Leave the ports closed.” He used the “boy” address that earthmen always used for robots, but the robot showed no adverse response. It couldn’t, of course. Its responses were limited and controlled by the Laws of Robotics. The robot bent its large metal body in the travesty of a respectful bow and left.1 There are three different tones in this passage, audiated from three different voices: two in dialogue and one as narrator. When speaking to the robot, Detective Baley in Isaac Asimov’s The Naked son, deploys a tone someone might use with a servant. The robot’s speech audiates as impersonal, as a voice reading instructions, especially in its proclivity for passive voice constructions, which suggest that Baley will not be in control of much of his environment. The narrator explains the social relations between “earthmen” and robots with some patience and an implied commentary on the insecurity of “earthmen” who speak to robots as if they were inferiors. Then the narrator either describes the robot as capable

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of opinion in its “travesty of a respectful bow” or imposes its own estimation of human/robot relations in the description. Mapping a circumstance of potential human-robot conflict, this exchange occurs as Baley embarks on a spaceship to another planet to investigate a murder with, as it turns out, a robot partner, R. Daneel Olivaw. R. Daneel functions in this 1963 novel in much the same way that contemporary computer devices function in twentyfirst-century television series focused on forensics, offering reliable information qua information, presumed (partly via the tone of its delivery and partly via cultural assumptions about machine’s lack of vested interests) to be dedicated to providing facts untinged by bias. R. Daneel, however, like the famous “Hal” of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is sentient, meaning that it can perceive and react to its surroundings, which lends it an impression of consciousness.2 Thus, when these computer/robots speak—and maybe simply because they speak—we audiate their tone as coming from a site of conscious personality. Robot tone is the imaginary of a persona audiated through the language characteristic of robot speech. In this way, such audiations offer an overt anatomy of the way we attribute personality—and hence originating consciousness—to the source of all speech reproduced in texts. Even the speech of the presumably impersonal robot in the previous passage intones some persona: a consciousness that Baley treats him as a servant to which the robot responds wryly. Language enacts the tone we audiate as we read. Tone engenders the imaginary sense of a voice deriving from a conscious being whose thoughts and feelings language intones. Assuming a voice as the source of the language, we endow that voice with an imaginary consciousness. When one voice—the narrator—quotes another voice with a different tone, the layering produces the sense of two different imaginary voices, each of which evinces personality via tone. Because the language of texts belongs to characters and narrators, we also imagine that somewhere producing this language that intones an imaginary being is a real being who can manipulate language, though this being does not necessarily— or maybe ever—intone itself. These layerings suggest that the personae language intones need not be frank, representative, or even conscious, except as the illusion of voice and being produced through language. It also suggests that such voice and tone need have no correlation with any living being. To go further, language

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intones a voice that rarely if ever can reproduce the consciousness that inscribed it; what we might attribute to authors always gets away even from them.3 None of this is particularly new, but it does raise questions about why readers so often have immediate recourse to their imaginary of an author as the site of meaning (as if writers can entirely control the connotations and effects of language or represent anything the way they think they are). That is the function of the fallacy of “authorial intention” as defining, subtending, or explaining any of the ways the language of texts actually works to produce the sense of conscious speakers. Why do readers need to imagine a knowing author? One reason may be that all of the ersatz illusions of speaking consciousness produce the impression of an origin, a source that moors them. There is nothing more fearsome than language that speaks for itself.

HAL-Tones Just because computers may compose text or even speak, it does not mean they have consciousness. Nonetheless, because we can program machines to deploy the same language (more or less) as humans, texts that quote algorithmic-based machines that speak or texts composed by such machines produce the same illusion of a conscious being as other texts. Even if Asimov’s R. Daneel is a robot, the sense of conscious being it intones produces a speaking being whom readers audiate as a conscious being who evokes empathy. R. Daneel Olivaw is likable. But what might readers like about him? That he is a robot who imitates rationality so well? That he is more rational than the human protagonist, Baley (who is also an empathetic character)? That R. Daneel is reliable and unbiased, a necessary appurtenance to the human Baley whose feelings sometimes get in the way of logic? Machines assert facts. Like the headlines Bernays analyzes in Propaganda, these assertions stand for themselves, offering truth as truth, backed by the imaginary of experts. Intoned by their impression of declarative certainty, these statements are selfauthorizing. In the case of the computer or the robot, the expert is the computer itself, its algorithmic process assumed to be unbiased

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and necessarily true. Hence, when a computer speaks, it speaks only truth in the form of facts. Our apprehension of this as truth is an effect not only of the intonation of its delivery—that is, what we imagine to be the “toneless” tone of the machine, which is, ironically, a tone nonetheless—but also of our credulity about the impartiality of computer operations themselves. But the algorithms that comprise computer programs are not impartial; they sort for whatever the programmer tells them to sort for. Even if we assume computers deliver unbiased facts, the selection of facts depends both on the ways in which programmers design the algorithms that search for them and on what “facts” (or “data”) the computer has in its data base. What this means is that our perception of machine “truth” depends upon our general ignorance about how computers and other machines work. This is akin to what Bernays points out about how the general public knows little about how public policy, scientific research, or many other “authorizing” discourses work, hence the notion that declarative headline statements stand for themselves. As the purveyor of headlines, the news media, thus, offers the best site from which computers might finally “author” texts. And, in fact, they do. As the BBC News describes it: “Robo-journalism is the process of automatically writing complete and complex news stories without any human intervention.”4 I would love it if even this definition were a bit of robo-journalism. Google, for example, has invested in a Reporters and Data and Robots (RADAR) scheme in Britain . . . which has already started to produce computergenerated news stories. . . . This involves increasingly sophisticated Artificial Intelligence Natural Language Generation software which processes information and transforms it into news copy by scanning data, selecting an article template form a range of preprogrammed options, then adding specific details such as place names.5 A German study on the reception of such robo-written news stories reports that “readers rate texts generated by algorithms more credible than texts written by real journalists.”6 This seems quite likely given the imaginary authority audiated from toneless declarative statements, especially those that offer specific

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numerical data as self-authorizing material. Although readers do not necessarily know that what they are reading is robo-written, what they audiate is the tone long associated with the kind of factuality intoned by news anchormen (back when television news was credited with impartiality). Attentive readers, however, if they thought about it, would be able to tell the difference between human and robot generated text, based on the way the language of the text produces tone. The Same Sports Story Twice UNC BEATS LOUISVILLE 72-71 ON LATE PAIGE BASKET CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Marcus Paige scored with nine seconds remaining in the game to give North Carolina a 72-71 lead over Louisville. The Heels held on to win by that same score following a missed 3-pointer by Wayne Blackshear and an unsuccessful second-chance attempt by Terry Rozier. The Paige basket capped off a 13-point comeback for the Tar Heels who trailed 63-50 after a Blackshear 3-pointer with 8:43 left in the game. UNC finished the game on a 22-8 run to secure the victory. After a basket by Brice Johnson gave North Carolina a 70-69 lead with 39 seconds left, Rozier responded with a hoop to give Louisville a one-point advantage with 26 seconds remaining. NO. 18 UNC EDGES NO. 5 LOUISVILLE ON MARCUS PAIGE’S LATE LAYUP CHAPEL HILL, N.C.—Marcus Paige ignored the pain in his twice-injured right foot, put his head down and drove toward the rim. He sent a shot high on the backboard that dropped through the net, giving No. 18 North Carolina a comeback win that might also jolt the preseason All-American out of his slow start to the season. Paige’s scooping layup with 8.5 seconds left capped UNC’s comeback from 13 down in the final 8 1/2 minutes to beat Louisville 72-71 on Saturday. “I said jokingly to my teammates that I was back,” Paige said. “I know I haven’t been playing the way I’m capable of playing, you guys know that, it’s pretty well documented at this point.

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And I need to play better. . . . But my teammates still have a lot of confidence in me and I still have a lot of confidence in myself.” It is not difficult to discern which is the robo-journalism and which is written by a reporter.7 The first version audiates as facts and numbers—is data-focused—but in its matter-of-fact description also audiates very much the same way that television sports reporters intone their reports. The absence of adjectives and the focus only on how the score changed in the final moments of the game offers a depersonalized, numerical imitation of a sports reporting formula as if sports were all about the score and not about the players’ efforts, heroics, and the spirit of the game. The second sample centers on heroic scorer Marcus Paige, offering a human view of a battle between basketball powerhouses. It offers the same information, or at least the crux of the final moments, but instead of an analysis of the shifting scores through the latter part of the game, it focuses on one player’s return to success. The first is facts and numbers; the second parallels the team’s success with Paige’s return to better playing. The first audiates as spiritless numbers, perhaps the kind of report bettors would like. The second deploys colorful adjectives, refers to the physical pain of a player, audiates as an echo of the excitement of the game itself. Not only personal in its focus on Paige, the second essay intones the persona of the writer who describes events as a spectator, as a consciousness vested in the game. Would readers want to know the persona who narrates the first? Do readers audiate the distinction between the two? What difference does it make?

The Machine May Well Intone the Message Now that there are devices for instant messaging, to what extent does the interface between user and machine affect, define, inflect the tone of what the user types, punches, or thumbs into the device? Thumb typed messages (mostly on phones) are terse by necessity. Terseness intones distance and impersonality. Text messages are pragmatic even if they aren’t. Emails thumbed on a phone take on the impersonal quality of text messages. It is work to thumb.

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But the same may be true to a lesser degree when one types into a keyboard whose location (on a screen), on a desk top, on a tiny pad, on a laptop, defines the user’s ease of use. Often these keyboards are not felicitous interfaces, shifting size, the location of some symbols, requiring shifting for punctuation, etc. They are all barricades between the user and the message, just as the internet itself is a greedy information gleaner, corporate harvester, claimant to user’s information, and finally a literal barricade between user and user as it supplants presence with a realm of computed artificiality. Machines impart only a small fraction of what might constitute the tone of interpersonal exchange in presence. So as long as machines intervene, they will alter tone, inadvertently at first, then accustom us to toneless and impersonal writing that looks something like that produced by the robot sports writer. Although the delusion is that the machines ever more closely mimic human interaction, the truth is the opposite. Tonally, our personas are becoming machinic. What we “speak” through machines displaces the human into a world that does not exist. Tone becomes a machinic drone in which emojis replace language and personality, in which emojis impart what little tone there is.

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NOTES

Preface 1 “Tone,” Online Etymological Dictionary, accessed October 1, 2018, https://www.etymonline.com/word/ tone#etymonline_v_15358. 2 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt, 1927), 125. 3 There are very few studies devoted to tone alone. The term often appears in lists that include “mood,” or in relation to specific literary works, translation projects, or discussions of ambiance. At the date of writing (November 21, 2018) the MLA Bibliography lists 2,034 publications treating “Tone in literature” and 4,806 with the word “Tone” in the title, but only 29 essays combining tone and narrative theory. In his essay of “Faulkner’s Narrative Styles,” J. E. Bunselmeyer specifically tracks tone as an element of point of view using John Searle’s speech act theory, noting, in particular, “the ways by which narrative syntax creates tone and point of view” (424). Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, 2nd ed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), perhaps the central authority in matters of narrative, barely mentions tone and certainly does not consider it an aspect of fiction in its own right. See Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 4 In the analysis of tone, categories that define the type of narrator are irrelevant, except as they might contribute to tone. Such categories as “direct discourse,” “indirect discourse,” and “free indirect discourse” (FID) offer nothing further insofar as the narrator is produced as an effect of the text and various arrangements by which characters present their own speech (direct discourse), or in which the thought and speech of characters is presented by the narrator who is produced as an effect of the text (“indirect discourse”), or the inmixture of both (FID), produce tone as an effect of the imaginary of the speaker the text attributes with the language—that is, a first- or third-person narrator or speaking character or layered narrator/ character. The inmixture of narrator and character as multiple sources of discourse presented in the same text produces the sense of a layering of tones as

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the text itself loops through the imaginary sources the telling produces. For definitions of “Direct,” “Indirect,” and “FID,” see H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 231–35.

Chapter 1 1 Evelyn Waugh, Scoop (Boston and New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 1. 2 Ibid. Waugh originally published the novel in 1937. 3 Walter Benjamin ascribes the sense of an original to what he denominates “aura” in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51. In the context of prose fiction, “aura” refers more to the combined and often indescribable sum of the effects of its elements. 4 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross Murfin (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), 20. 5 In The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, for example, discusses “The Author’s Many Voices,” the “Author’s ‘Second Self,’” “The Author’s Voice in Fiction,” but only specifically alludes to “tone” three times in a 450-page work: once to liken tone to “the currently fashionable terms ’irony’ and ‘distance’” (159), once when discussing the work of Jonathan Swift (320), and most expansively when he is discussing the implied author: “Tone” is similarly used to refer to the implicit evaluation which the author manages to convey behind his explicit presentation, but it almost inevitably suggests again something limited to the merely verbal; some aspects of the implied author may be inferred through tonal variations, but his major qualities will depend also on the hard facts of action and character in the tale that is told. (74) This discussion footnotes a passage from Fred Millett in Reading Fiction: “This tone, this general feeling which suffuses and surrounds the work, arises ultimately out of the writer’s attitude towards his subject . . . The subject derives its meaning from the view of life which the author has taken” (74, note 9). Curiously, here the critics define tone by appealing to an origin, an implied sense of personal authenticity on the part of the writer. But if we do not equate author and narrator, where is tone other than in “the merely verbal”?

NOTES  237

6 Except more recently where in the United States “message” has outstripped all of a text’s subtleties, enabling students to miss tonal irony, parody, satire, and other textual self-commentary, as they seek evidence of the binaries of social oppression. 7 Because he consistently conflates author and narrator, Booth actually has no indexed reference to “voice” in The Rhetoric of Fiction. 8 Waugh, Scoop, 1. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Apart from studies of Waugh’s or modernist satire in general few critics undertake a consideration of tone in Waugh’s novels. Among these are notably, James Nichols’s study of tone in Waugh’s earlier novels, “Romantic and Realistic: The Tone of Evelyn Waugh’s Early Novels,” College English 24, no. 1 (1962): 46–56, and Robert Frick, “Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” Papers on Language & Literature 28, no. 4 (Fall 1992): 417–41.

Chapter 2 1 Frick, “Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” 421 2 Ibid., 417. All subsequent quotes from this essay are from this version. 3 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 74. Attempts to categorize the imaginary sources of tone in analyses of tone have produced such categories as “direct discourse,” “indirect discourse,” and “free indirect discourse” (FID). These imaginary sources are irrelevant since the narrator is produced as an effect of the text and various arrangements by which characters present their own speech (direct discourse), or in which the thought and speech of characters is presented by the narrator who is produced as an effect of the text (“indirect discourse”), or the inmixture of both (FID), produce tone as an effect of the imaginary of the speaker the text attributes with the language—that is, third-person narrator or speaking character or layered narrator/character. The inmixture of narrator and character as multiple sources of discourse presented in the same text produces the sense of a layering of tones as the text itself loops through the imaginary sources the telling produces. For definitions of “Direct,” “Indirect” and “FID,” see Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 231–5.

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4 Frick, “Style and Structure in the Early Novels of Evelyn Waugh,” 419. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 417. 7 Ibid., 420. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid., 420–1. 11 Ibid., 417.

Chapter 3 1 Molly Hite, “Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” Narrative 18, no. 3 (October 2010): 249–75 at 49. All subsequent citations are from this essay. 2 The “ethical turn” which emerged in force in the 1980s considers the power entitlements of literary critics, the critical power to continue ethically questionable perspectives, and finally an attention to literary texts’ deployment of circumstances and styles that produce or perpetuate unethical discourses or circumstances. As James Merod comments, No opposition or intellectual resistance takes place outside the system of power relations; the most radical critic is in some degree supported by the profession and the culture whose values and practices he or she challenges. The critic, in other words, is close to things to be opposed because they are ultimately connected to the work and the identity of the critic. They are entangled with the critic’s authority. Opposition, therefore, is as much directed at the false and compromising choices any intellectual may make (may have made many times, in fact, because those choices suffuse professional life) as it is directed ‘out there’ against countless foes who represent tyranny. (132) quoted by Bruce Henrickson, “‘The Real Thing’: Criticism and the Ethical Turn,” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature 27, no. 4 (1991 Fall): 473–95 at 486–7. In the same essay, Henrickson quotes Tobin Siebers from The Ethics of Criticism: “An ethical literary criticism is no longer exclusively textual, nor is it wholly political, for politics and ethics, although related, do not reflect the same ends. To criticize

NOTES  239

ethically brings the critic into a special field of action: the field of human conduct and belief concerning the human” (1) at 492. See also Tobin Siebers, The Ethics of Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). 3 Hite, “Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” 250. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Derrida makes this point in, among other texts, “Signature Event Context,” in Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman (trans.), Limited, Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 1–23. 7 Not to be too old-fashioned, but in Theory of Literature, Third Edition (New York: HBJ, 1956), René Wellek and Austin Warren critique modes of interpretation that rely on attributions of authorial intention: “The total meaning of a work of art is not exhausted by, or even equivalent to, its intention. As a system of values, it leads an independent life” (42). Later in her essay, Molly Hite makes the case that “Woolf’s usual, more nuanced strategy in the fiction involves withholding cues that would signal an understanding between author and reader about whether a passage should be read as mockery, censure, sympathy, condescension, or some other evaluative mode” (“Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” 256), which still assumes a basic connection between author and reader that a fictional text should somehow convey. The entire notion of an author “withholding” suggests that ideally fiction is didactic, something with which modernist authors might disagree. 8 Hite, “Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” 251. 9 Ibid., 255. 10 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 151. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 151–2. 13 Ibid., 152. 14 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 9–16, esp. 9. 15 Peter Rabinowitz, “‘The Absence of Her Voice from That Concord’: The Value of the Implied Author,” Style: A Quarterly Journal of Aesthetics, Poetics, Stylistics, and Literary Criticism 45, no. 1 (2011 Spring): 103. All subsequent quotes attributed to Rabinowitz are from this essay. 16 Rabinowitz, “‘The Absence of Her Voice from that Concord,’” 102. 17 Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 153–5.

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18 Ibid., 155. 19 Ibid., 156. 20 Ibid., 156–8.

Chapter 4 1 David Sedaris, “Six to Eight Black Men,” in Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (New York: Back Bay Books, 2005), 157–64, esp. 157–8. 2 Lauren Hilgers, “In Person,” The Austin Chronicle, June 25, 2004, accessed August 20, 2018, https​://ww​w.aus​tinch​ronic​le.co​m/boo​ks/20​ 04-06​-25/2​17526​/. 3 Stephani Sutherland, “When We Read, We Recognize Words as Pictures and Hear Them Spoken Aloud,” Scientific American, July 1, 2015, accessed August 20, 2018, https​://ww​w.sci​entif​i came​rican​.com/​ arti-​cle/w​hen-w​e-rea​d-we-​recog​nize-​words​-as-p​ictur​es-an​d-hea​r-the​ m-spo​ken-a​loud/​. 4 Wayne C. Booth, among many others, locates these various versions of the locus of “attitude” enchained in relation to what the text itself offers as narrator, voice, and tone. See, generally, Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction. 5 Booth observes in The Rhetoric of Fiction: To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote. As Jessamyn West says, it is sometimes “only by writing the story that the novelist can discover—not his story—but its writer, the official scribe, so to speak, for that narrative.” Whether we call this implied author an “official scribe,” or adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tillotson—the author’s “second self”—it is clear that the picture the reader gets of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects. However impersonal he may try to be, his reader will inevitably construct a picture of the official scribe who writes in this manner—and of course the official scribe will never be neutral toward all values. (71) The question of why so many critics assume these multiple layers of origin, one appended to the imaginary of a “scribe,” is subject for a different discussion, as is the constant assertion of the “values” or attitude of a text’s voice, which is produced not by an exterior origin, but by the text itself.

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6 Kevin Kopelson notes that like David Sedaris’s work, his own book on Sedaris’s work is “both autobiographical and performative” in both J. L. Austin’s sense of the word as a speech act and in the sense of the adjective as referring to something performed. See Kopelson’s Sedaris (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 7 As Percival Everett has noted several times to live audiences, once he has written a novel, he is the same as the next reader, having no privileged relationship to the text. 8 Among these is Kylie Cardell and Victoria Kuttainen, “The Ethics of Laughter: David Sedaris and Humour Memoir,” Mosaic 45, no. 3 (September 2012): 99–114. This chapter initially mentions “tone” (99) but focuses ultimately on the mix of fiction and non-fiction in the stories. 9 “Audiation,” The Gordon Institute for Music Learning, https://giml. org/mlt/audiation/, accessed August 20, 2018. I first learned of the processes of audiation in an Honors Thesis by Christian Johnson at Rice University. 10 Sutherland, “When We Read, We Recognize Words as Pictures and Hear Them Spoken Aloud.” 11 In summarizing various narrative theorists’ assessments that reading is both forward and backward, Wallace Martin notes, The reader integrates story materials in two patterns simultaneously. One is prospective, involving action more than theme: given the trajectory of events up to this point, what is the most likely outcome, and how will the enigmas (questions, indices) be resolved? But like Janus, the reader is always looking backward as well as forward, actively restructuring the past in light of each new bit of information. This is the ‘double reading’ identified by Culler (1981). (Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 127) Culler’s analysis in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction investigates the clash of the logics of story and discourse: These two logics, one of which insists upon the causal efficacy of origins and the other of which denies their causal efficacy, are in contradiction but they are essential to the way in which the narrative functions. One logic assumes the primacy of events; the other treats the events as the products of meanings. One could argue that every narrative operates according to this double logic, presenting its plot as a sequence of events which is prior to and

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independent of the given perspective on these events, and, at the same time, suggesting by its implicit claims to significance that these events are justified by their appropriateness to a thematic structure. (105) This is a slightly different rational for any claim that tone, too, is a product of reading forward and backward at the same time. 12 Sedaris, “Six to Eight Black Men,” 157–8. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 157–8. 19 Ibid., 157. 20 Ibid., 157–8. 21 Ibid.

Chapter 5 1 See Percival Everett and James Kincaid’s A History of the AfricanAmerican People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told by Percival Everett and James Kincaid (New York: Akashic Books, 2004). 2 Ibid., 50.

Chapter 6 1 Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (New York: Penguin, 1998), 23. 2 See both Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (74) and James Phelan’s “Voice, Tone, and the Rhetoric of Narrative Communication,” Language and Literature, 23, no. 1 (2014): 49–60 at 50: “And what role does tone, the attitude the speaker takes toward the subject matter of the utterance, play in the construction of a distinctive voice and in the effectiveness of lines such as these?” Phelan’s footnote cites the work of K. Wales, which offers another definition of tone: “Wales notes that ‘in ordinary usage, tone or tone of voice means a particular quality of sound associated with particular emotions or feelings’”

NOTES  243

(K. Wales, A Dictionary of Stylistics, 3rd ed. [Harlow, Essex: Longman, 2011], 425). That emphasis on sound highlights the challenge of identifying tone in written texts. I propose that by conceiving of tone as attitude, a broader conception than emotions or feelings, we can better meet this challenge.” 3 J. L. Austin’s concept of the “speech act” offers a notion of “the performative sentence”: “It seems clear that to utter the sentence (in, of course, the appropriate circumstances) is not to de-scribe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it” (6). How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962). 4 See Derrida’s “Signature Event Context,” 1–23 (See endnote xvi.) 5 As, for example, Charles Mauron’s “psychocriticism” which explores the ways structures and motifs continually reappear in an author’s apparently unrelated texts. See, for example, Des métaphores obsédantes au mythe personnel. Introduction à la psychocritique (Paris: José Corti, 1989). 6 Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 35–6. 7 In his essay, “From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value,” Arizona Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2010): 115–43, Daniel Tracy sees “a split in the novel’s tone . . . as a key effect of its appropriation of nineteenth-century vernacular humor” (116). He also credits all of this to Loos as an originary, crafting source. 8 Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 36 9 In addition to Tracy’s essay, several other critics note the ways Gentlemen Prefer Blondes plays with cultural and class expectations through Lorelei’s discourse, including Susan Hegeman, “Taking Blondes Seriously,” American Literary History 7, no. 3 (1995): 525–4; Noël Falco Dolan, “Loos Lips: How a Girl Like I Talks to Gentlemen,” Women’s Studies 37 (2008): 73–88. 10 In her essay, “‘One of the Few Books that Doesn’t Stink’: The Intellectuals, the Masses and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Critical Survey 17, no. 3 (2005): 28–48, Faye Hammill sees Lorelei’s “efforts to suppress Dorothy” as “disingenuous, since she records all her friend’s rebellious pronouncements, thereby preserving the subversive elements of her story under a veneer of respectability” (39). 11 Both Tracy and Hammill comment upon the ways the novel layers the voices, and Tracy also sees this layering continuing into questions of audience reception (Tracy, “From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism,” esp. 134).

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Chapter 7 1 For this characterization of comedy, see Judith Roof’s The Comic Event: Comedic Performance from the 1950s to the Present (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2 Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm (London: Penguin, 2006), 49. All subsequent citations are from this edition. 3 D. H. Lawrence, The Fox, in The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, ed. Dieter Mehl (London: Penguin, 1994), 5–71, esp. 8. 4 In “Cold Comfort Farm, D. H. Lawrence, and English Literary Culture Between the Wars,” Faye Hammill traces all of the parodical affinities between Gibbons’s novel and the work of Lawrence, Hardy and Emily Brönte, which she finds “curious because Cold Comfort Farm is an extremely sophisticated and intricate parody whose meaning is produced through its relationship with the literary culture of its day and with the work of such canonical authors as D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, and Emily Brönte” (831). 5 Lawrence, The Fox, 5. 6 In “The Complexities of Gender and Genre in Lawrence’s Fox,” Essays in Literature, 19, no. 1 (1992): 84–97 at 87, Marijane Osborn notes the “typical” character of “Lawrence’s numerous half-asleep female characters” as well as “Lawrence’s attention to buttocks.” 7 Mary Gladys Meredith Webb’s The House in Dormer Forest (New York: George Doran Co., 1921), 17. 8 Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, 36. 9 Mary Gladys Meredith Webb wrote novels set in the Shropshire countryside, including Gone to Earth (London: Constable, 1917), and The Golden Arrow (London: Constable, 1916). Sheila Kaye-Smith wrote novels set in Sussex and Kent, including the bestselling The End of the House of Alard (London: Cassell, 1924). 10 From The Politics of Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), Linda Hutchison comments, “It is rather like saying something whilst at the same time putting inverted commas around what is being said. The effect is to highlight, or ‘highlight,’ and to subvert, or ‘subvert,’ and the mode is therefore a ‘knowing’ and an ironic—or even ‘ironic’—one” (1). 11 For the tendency to see relations between the sexes as a compulsion beyond human control from which the male seeks immunity in Lawrence’s work, see Peggy Brayfield’s “Lawrence’s ‘Male and Female Principles’ and the Symbolism of ‘The Fox,’” Mosaic 4, no. 3 (1971):

NOTES  245

41–51; Douglas Wuchina, Destinies of Splendor: Sexual Attraction in D. H. Lawrence (New York: Peter Lang, 2009); and Patricia C. Davis, “Chicken Queen’s Delight: D.H. Lawrence’s ‘The Fox,’” Modern Fiction Studies, 19, no. 4 (Winter 1973–74): 565–71. 12 Lawrence, The Fox, 70–1.

Chapter 8 1 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 25. 2 Lawrence, The Fox, 65. 3 Ibid., 65–6. 4 Ibid., 66. 5 Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1925), 77–8, esp. 50. 6 In “Tonal Cues and Uncertain Values: Affect and Ethics in Mrs. Dalloway,” Molly Hite focuses on the “experimental” nature of what its third-person narrator “complicates or withholds” (249). As she notes, “I suggest that one radically experimental effect of Woolf’s middle-period fiction arises from a calculated refusal or perplexing of authoritative directions that would enable readers to take crucial elements of her narrative discourse: to assign what they perceive to be authorially sanctioned feelings and thus values to the main events and characters” (250).

Chapter 9 1 Bram Stoker, Dracula (New York: Signet, 1992), 49. 2 In “The Narrative Method of Dracula,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, no. 1 (1985): 61–75, David Seed describes Harker’s general mood as he ventures into the Count’s territory as “muffled unease,” and notes that as the journal entries “all end on a point of crisis” and “the progression of events is remorselessly toward confronting Dracula’s own vampirism, . . . there is therefore a constant backwards pull in Harker’s journal, an attempt to retard or even suspend the flow of events so that he can organize them into some kind of explanation” (64). 3 Stoker, Dracula (Harker, unnumbered page preceding page 1).

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4 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 1963). 5 Cedric Watts shows the connections between Dracula and Heart of Darkness mostly through the likeness of the Count and Kurtz as undead wraiths and the undead, showing how Conrad’s novel “Evokes memories of Stoker’s depiction of the ‘undead’” (1). In “Conradian Eldritch: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Joseph Conrad’s ‘The Heart of Darkness,’” The Conradian 37, no. 2 (2012): 1–18. 6 Stoker, Dracula, 19. 7 Ibid., 21. 8 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 110.

Chapter 10 1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London: The Folio Society, 1975), 13. 2 In “Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending,” Karen Newman notes: By reading an Austen novel as a unity with romantic marriage as its final statement, we impose a resolution on her work that makes it conform to the very expectations for women and novels that Austen’s irony constantly undermines. Such a habit of reading, which, as Welsh puts it in ELH 50, 4 (1983), defines any action by its ending, falls prey to a teleological prejudice that contemporary criticism has called into question. As critics and feminists, we must refuse the effect of her endings; instead of simply accepting the text as it presents itself, we must investigate the contradictory, disparate elements from which it is made: the psychological paradigms, the raw materials of ideology and of women’s place in culture. (694) The irony of the first line already suggests that the hinted ending has many layers of irony. In “Jane Austen: Irony and Authority,” Women’s Studies 15 (1988), Rachel Brownstein points to the ways Austen’s novels deploy irony as a way to bring certain modes of power and cultural habit into question: “Courtship as power play is the subject of all Austen’s novels; playing with—or against—power is the substance of them. And through irony, by pointing to the limits of definitive and assertive language, Jane Austen suggests a powerful and pleasurable relation women in patriarchy may have to discursive authority” (57– 8). In “Second Impressions of a Famous First Sentence,” Persuasions 25 (2003), Edward Neill also comments, “The initially grandiose tone of the epigram leads swiftly to bathos, summoning what Roland Barthes

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(ironically?) described as ‘the code of irony’ to undo its own lapidary pomposity; hinting at a theme of ‘interested parties’ behind a screen of high-mindedness” (76). 3 Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” in The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1971), 117. 4 Claire Katz locates this rich irony in “voice”: “Perhaps nowhere is her use of violence more sophisticated than in her narrative voice. For O’Connor as narrator plays the role of scourge. Using the weapon of wit, she derides the pretensions of personality in icily-wrought metaphors” (56). In “Flannery O’Connor’s Rage of Vision,” American Literature 46, no. 1 (1974): 54–67. David Huddle defines O’Connor’s narrative voice: The phrase I’ve come up with to describe the voice of those stories is “Ironic Confidence,” an oxymoron that I think is accurate as far as it goes. I’m talking about a voice that is so self-assured that it invites a reader to question—or interrogate—it. But in O’Connor’s stories there are four or five different variations of that self-assured voice, and not all of them ironic. (30) In “The Singular Voice of Flannery O’Connor,” Flannery O’Connor Review, 13 (2015): 30–9. In “Flannery O’Connor, Laughter, and the Word Made Flesh,” Studies in American Fiction, 26, no. 1 (1998): 115–28, Mark Boren envisions O’Connor’s style (as opposed specifically to tone): O’Connor’s style is singular in American letters, combining an ambivalent, even abusive, social laughter that is not negative with images of self-contained, isolated figures characteristic of our own modern age. The combination lies at the heart of her fiction and generates much of the power contained within her grotesque work. Her success lies in moving laughter to generalized positions in her narratives, incorporating it throughout her entire text. (115) 5 Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (New York: New Directions, 1959), 7. 6 This is both in concert with and in contrast to what Allan Pero in “‘Look for One Thing and You Find Another’: The Voice and Deduction in Muriel Spark’s ‘Memento Mori,’” Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 3 (2008): 558–73, analyzes as the functions of “voice” or the “sonic” in Memento Mori: Her novel places a kind of sonic pressure on the difference between speech and the voice. What is that difference? Speech is, of course, the communication of words with the instrument of the voice. But what is the voice? In Lacanian terms, as Mladen Dolar

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explains, the voice is a much more difficult object to place since it is a symptom of what is left over from speech, an uncanny object that speech cannot completely master. In other words, the voice as symptom, as a thing without a body, is that which exceeds speech or that which exceeds speech’s capacity to make sound meaningful (Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More [Boston: MIT Press, 2006], 15). The problem of voice as a thing without a body, as an enigmatic object of desire is, I contend, what drives the mystery of the plot. (559) In a written text, of course, we only audiate the “voice” as such, which is more a combination of tone and personality. 7 Spark, Memento Mori, 7. 8 Ibid., 8.

Chapter 11 1 Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat (New York: New Directions, 1970), 7–8. 2 In “Surface and Structure: Reading Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat,” Ian Rankin characterizes the novel’s tone as “foreboding” (149), and again, the narrative tone is one of reportage. Understatement is used for effect. There is no personal feeling on the narrator’s part as we are informed that Lise is to be murdered. The mystery which impels us to read on is: how does it come to happen? The narrator will gladly supply the details, and on a second reading the cleverness, the poetic legerdemain with which the narrator does supply the details, the surreptitious use of this or that red herring, will keep us reading just as avidly. (150) In The Journal of Narrative Technique, 15, no. 2 (1985): 146–55. Jonathan Kemp describes the style of the novel as all is lean and taciturn: we are given very little on which to base any speculation as to Lise’s motives, certainly no psychological explanations of her actions are offered in any straightforward manner. Everything is described externally, as if it were being viewed through a camera lens. This narrative device is an example of what we might call subjectivity without psychology, actions and speech offered without any explicit recourse to the inner workings of the mind. (545)

NOTES  249

Later in his essay, he calls Spark’s style, “Arch and disengaged” (555). See Rankin’s “‘Her Lips Are Slightly Parted’: The Ineffability of Erotic Sociality in Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat,” Modern Fiction Studies 54, no.3 (2008): 544–57. 3 Dorothy Parker, “The Waltz,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade (New York: Penguin, 2006), 47–51. 4 Julia Boissoneau Hans characterizes Parker’s prose as having a “sharp, urbane style, which is filled with crisp dialogue, bitter irony, and finely wrought description” (100). She characterizes “The Waltz” as a story “with many insights into the reciprocal relationship between gender and language construction. It is told in two voices, the public and the private” (104). In “Whose Line Is It Anyway? Reclamation of Language in Dorothy Parker’s Polyphonic Monologues,” Part of a Special Section: Humorous Subversions: Animation as Cultural Critique 3, no. 17 (January 2008): 99–116. 5 Parker, “The Waltz,” 48. 6 Ibid., 49. 7 Spark, The Driver’s Seat, 25. 8 Ibid., 107. 9 Ibid.

Chapter 12 1 No matter how a text situates what it recounts; it always produces a sense of a teller somewhere. Whatever narrator we imagine is recounting is produced an effect of the telling. The telling, then, enacts approximations of intimacy or distance, layered rendition, more or less of a sense of any narratorial persona. In considerations of tone, such elaborate taxonomic schema as devised by narratologists (as, for example, Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978]) are themselves only ways of understanding the characteristics and functioning of the sense of a narrator produced as an effect of the text. Because of this, variations of “direct,” “indirect,” and “free indirect” discourse are irrelevant to apperceptions of tone. 2 Forster, Where Angels Fear to Tread, 110. 3 In “The Aesthetic View of Life: Where Angels Fear to Tread,” Modern Fiction Studies 7, no. 3 (1961), Alan Wilde characterizes Philip’s role in the novel as that of “Spectator made apparent from the very

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beginning of the book” (211). In regarding the spectation of the spectator, then, the novel already produces layers of self-conscious observation. 4 In “Depths and Surfaces: Dimensions of Forsterian Irony,” English Literature in Translation, 1880-1920 16, no. 4 (1973), Alan Wilde analyzes the way the novel produces this sense of layered attitude as an effect of the text’s shifting among different styles of rhetoric. So the essentially paratactic style is at odds with the predilection for rhetorical figures and occasional high-sounding words and, too, with the addiction to inverted sentence order. The effect of this overlay of slightly old-fashioned elements on a predominantly simple syntax is to create a sense of a voice both fastidious and mannered, a combination which, for all the apparent intimacy of that voice, helps to keep the reader and the characters as well at a distance. Philip, we are told, “always adopted a dry satirical manner when he was puzzled” (75), and the description suits Forster’s tone too, if one allows for occasional modulations into enthusiasm and sentimentality. (260) 5 Forster, Aspects of the Novel, 25. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid., 25–6. 12 Ibid., 26. 13 Adelle Davis, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970), 16–17. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Ibid., 272. 16 Ibid., emphasis added. 17 Cathy Davidson, The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 91. 18 Lisa Spiro, “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 16. 19 Davis, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, 91.

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Chapter 13 1 See Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion (London: Penguin, 1915) and Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982). 2 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 3 William Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), 119–30, esp. 129. 4 In “Faulkner’s Narrative Styles,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 424–42., J. E. Bunselmeyer discusses the ways “stylistic analysis identifies the dominant features of Faulkner’s characteristic style as well as the variations in style that create differences in tone, ranging from comedy to thoughtful contemplation” (424), though the essay does not specifically address “A Rose for Emily.” Its approach to the relation between syntactical analysis and tone is also far more generalized, focusing on the production of comedy and contemplation. 5 In “The Ultimate Voyeur: The Communal Narrator of ‘A Rose for Emily,’” Eureka Studies in Teaching Short Fiction 6, no. 2 (Spring 2006), Alice Robertson comments on the capabilities of “this composite communal narrator, who speaks with a single voice, is usually reliable for facts but completely ignorant of characters’ motives and therefore often misinterprets events personally witnessed or reported second-hand,” arguing that the text’s deployment of this narrator was in service both as a mode of strategic storytelling and a way to render female characters (157). “As a traditional Southern male,” Robertson comments, “Faulkner the writer faced the necessity of differentiating historically and personally between the ‘complex interweaving of myth and memory’ that had constructed the moonlight and magnolias version of Southern ‘ladyhood’ so prevalent in the South of the 1930s” (155). Dennis Allen notes, “In fact, as the story progresses, the narrator increasingly resorts to the first-person plural, the growing use of ‘we’ suggesting a growing social cohesion. In contrast to the individual identities of the story’s aristocrats (Emily and Mr. Grierson, Colonel Sartoris, Judge Stevens), the townspeople blend into an undifferentiated whole. If the aristocratic ideal is exclusion, the democratic aim is inclusion” (693). In Dennis Allen, “Horror and Perverse Delight: Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily,” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (Winter 1984): 685–96. 6 Faulkner, “Rose for Emily,” 379. 7 Ibid., 380.

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8 Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus; The End of the Tether (New York: Dell, 1963), 67. 9 Ibid., 142. 10 Analyzing the novella’s construction and deployment of its narrator(s), Michael Levenson in “The Modernist Narrator on the Victorian Sailing Ship,” Browning Institute Studies, 11 (1983), notes, The novel begins in the detached tones of an impersonal voice speaking from a neutral perspective, above, beyond, and within the ship. This unnamed narrator views the “Narcissus” from many angles and refers to the crew as “they.” Then without transition, the fictional compass suddenly contracts. The crew becomes “we,” and the narrative is conducted for a time in the first-person plural. But only for a time. As abruptly as it seized the narrative, the first person gives way. (106–7) Bruce Henricksen interprets this shift in the context of political encounter between Marxism and Capitalism in “The Construction of the Narrator in The Nigger of the Narcissus,” PMLA, 103, no. 5 (1988): 783–95. 11 Conrad, The Nigger of the Narcissus, 57. 12 Ibid., 57–8, emphasis added. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 67. 15 Ibid., 147.

Chapter 14 1 Joseph Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (New York: Dell, 1967), 25. 2 Ibid. 3 Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (New York: Anchor, 2011), 3. 4 Ibid., 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 105. 8 Ibid., 81. 9 Ibid., 21. 10 Ibid., 129.

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Chapter 15 1 Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants,” in The Portable Hemingway, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: The Viking Press, 1944), 502–7, esp. 503. 2 Among the few critics who comment on the operation of the dialogue in this story, Kenneth Johnston disagrees with what critic Frank O’Connor says about the story: Frank O’Connor, for instance, complains that “Hills Like White Elephants” does not provide the reader with enough information to make the necessary moral judgments. “The light is admirably focused,” admits O’Connor, “but it is too blinding; we cannot see into the shadows.” One does not take lightly criticism by a short story writer of O’Connor’s stature and talent, but O’Connor is wrong. The reader can see, clearly and deeply, into the shadows if he submits to the discipline of close reading and fleshes out the implications of this lean story. (233) Johnston is quoting Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (Cleveland: World, 1963), 24–5 in his essay, “‘Hills Like White Elephants:’ Lean, Vintage Hemingway,” American Fiction, 10, no. 2 (1982): 233–8. Robert Paul Lamb offers an extended analysis of some of the sexual politics around the conversation in “Hemingway and the Creation of Twentieth-Century Dialogue,” Twentieth Century Literature, 42, no. 4 (1996): 453–80, esp. 468–73. 3 O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” 117. 4 W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor’s Edge (Philadelphia: The Blakiston Co, 1944), 4. 5 Dorothy Parker, “The Waltz,” in The Portable Dorothy Parker, ed. Marion Meade (New York: Penguin, 1973), 47–51. 6 William Faulkner, “Barn Burning,” in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1950), 3–26. 7 Richard Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” in Eight Men (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), 12. 8 Ibid., 11–26. 9 Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 172. 10 Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (New York: Back Bay Books, 1958), 52. 11 Ibid., 40.

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Chapter 16 1 Stoker, Dracula, 28. 2 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary (New York: Penguin, 2001), 16–17. 3 In “Authenticity, Convention, and Bridget Jones’s Diary,” Narrative, 9, no. 2 (2001), 176–81, Alison Case observes, In keeping with this pattern, the diary form in Bridget Jones also acts to call attention both to the desire for control and to its failures. Fielding calls attention to the narrative’s status as a written diary through a number of devices—Bridget’s habit of keeping records on behaviors she’d like to control better (eating, drinking, smoking) her use of abbreviations (“v. good”) and a telegraphic style to condense her writing, and at times the use of misspellings and rambling language to suggest entries written while drunk. The fact that Bridget keeps a diary, and keeps it the way she does, is an important aspect of her character—an indicator of her desire to take control of her life, get some perspective on her more obsessive behaviors, and confide in someone or something. (178) 4 Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 3. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

Chapter 17 1 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1931), 43. 2 Ibid., 41–2. 3 Ibid., 40. 4 Ralph Ellison, “King of the Bingo Game,” in Flying Home and Other Stories, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Random House, 1996), 123–36, esp. 123. 5 Wright, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” 469. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 471. 8 Ibid., 475. 9 Ibid., 476. 10 Ibid., 477.

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Chapter 18 1 Samuel Beckett, Endgame (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 69. 2 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988), 8–9. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 For further analysis of the figure of the kernel surrounded by a glow, see Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism,” in Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: Bedford Books, 1996), 277–98. In “A Voice of Unrest: Conrad’s Rhetoric of the Unspeakable,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 27, no. 3 (1985): 284–310, Charles Reeves also discusses Marlow’s tale as a “searching interpretive enactment” (289), noting as well that despite the apparent immobility of so many figures in Conrad’s early fiction, despite the languid atmosphere so often prevailing, the narrative voice itself is rarely submissive or inert; it circles, hovers, probes, pursues, gesticulates. We discern numerous fluctuations in tone and mood (grammatical and otherwise), trace shifts in diction, subject, resolve, audience. The only constancy is the urgency of these narrative enactments, the unrest and dismay behind the registering voice. (287) In “More Than a Voice from the Darkness: Charley Marlow and the Posture of an Invented Author,” Neophilologus 101 (2017): 159–74, Max Hermens shows the ways Marlow’s middleness is also a rhetorical mode: “Marlow continually takes up a posture that is not ‘fixed,’ a posture of in-betweenness with which he tries to avoid rigid sociopolitical structures, actively using this posture not only to locate himself in the novel’s world, but also to influence those around him” (159). 6 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 10. 7 Ibid., 11. 8 Ibid., 35. 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Ibid., 31. 11 Kenneth R. Lincoln examines the ways Heart of Darkness deploys comic incidents and tone in “Comic Light in Heart of Darkness” in Modern Fiction Studies 18, no. 2 (1972): 183–97. 12 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 76.

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Chapter 19 1 Percival Everett, Erasure (New York: Hyperion, 2001), 1. 2 Ibid., 1. 3 Ibid., 2. 4 See also Brigitte Félix, “‘The One That Got Away’: Fabulation in Percival Everett’s Fiction,” in Percival Everett: Transatlantic Readings, ed. Claire Maniez and Anne-Laure Tissut, (Grenoble: Éditions le Manuscrit, 2007), 15–33, which considers the range of Everett’s tone, especially as it embodies satire. In “Race Under Erasure for Percival Everett, ‘A Piece of Fiction,’” Callaloo, 28, no. 2 (2005), Margaret Russell expands the range of the novel’s interrogations to “questions about genre, mimesis, and authorial identity which exceed as well as inform, his critique of the nouveau-racism that pervades the contemporary literary” (358). 5 Everett, Erasure, 43. 6 Ibid., 53. 7 Ibid., 61–2. 8 Ibid., 75. 9 Ibid., 109. 10 Ibid., 131. 11 Ibid., 66. 12 Ibid., 69–70.

Chapter 20 1 Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), 12. 2 Ibid., 20. 3 In “Echoes of Closeted Desire(s): The Narrator and Character Voices of Jake Barnes,” The Hemingway Review, 2 (2000), J. F. Buckley identifies a different protocol that splits Barnes’s “voices”: “Thus Jake Barnes gives final voice to his ‘loves’ in Paris, Burguete, and Pamplona where he discriminates between heterosexual and homosexual desire but is rarely able to shift between his narrating role echoing the heterosexual—and his character role echoing the homosexual— without emphasizing that someone or something he desires is missing” (73–4). In “‘Primitive Emotions’: A Tragedy of Revenge Called the Sun Also Rises,” JNT 20, no. 1 (1990), Ernest Lockridge attributes

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the sense of bifurcated narrative tone more directly to Barnes’s resentments of Cohn, seeing the tone as reflecting the novel’s central conflict: “‘Retribution and punishment’ are by no means peripheral, or an eccentric singularity; they are the whole narrative’s primary mover. I will argue that violent sexual jealousy that Barnes bears toward Robert Cohn, and Barnes’s consequent desire for revenge, motivate the novel’s central action and overall structure, from Barnes’s sarcastic nowin attack on Cohn which begins the novel, Barnes’s act of ‘damned pimp[ing]’ (190), which predictably destroys Cohn to the emotional emptiness and self-revulsion with which this Pyrrhic victory leaves Barnes at novel’s end” (44). In “‘Bitched’: Feminization, Identity, and the Hemingwayesque in ‘The Sun Also Rises,’” Twentieth Century Literature 52, no. 1 (2006), Todd Onderdonk sees sexual difference as undergirding the hierarchies Jake’s narration reflects. 4 Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 101–2. 5 Ibid., 103–4. 6 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964). 7 Ibid., 83. 8 Ibid., 83–4.

Chapter 21 1 Ford, The Good Soldier. 2 In “Ford’s Good Narrator,” Studies in the Novel 5, no. 4 (1973), Vern B. Lentz traces Ford’s search for the ideal narrative tone: Ford’s description of his ideal for narrative tone appears still again in one of his last critical studies: “I went on working beside Conrad, trying, . . . to evolve for myself a vernacular of an extreme quietness that would suggest someone of some refinement talking in a low voice near the ear of someone else he liked a good deal.” Although all of these statements follow the publication of The Good Soldier, the conception was developed, according to Ford, during the years 1898–1903. The narrative voice they describe is that of The Good Soldier. This is not a narrative tone that Dowell simply falls into but one he decides to adopt—a pose he consciously manipulates throughout the novel.” (484). See Ibid., 19. 3 Ford, The Good Soldier, 14. 4 Ibid., 11. 5 Ibid., 14.

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6 Perhaps summarizing best critical attitude toward Dowell as an “unreliable” narrator, John Hessler in “Dowell and The Good Soldier: The Narrator Re-examined” comments: It is, perhaps, historically significant that Ford's novel contains only one real character, and that, the unreliable teller of the tale. In Jane Austen, where confidence in social reality was as yet unshaken, the narrator was omniscient, the narrative cast no doubt on the reality of "what happened,” and language was the tool of that confident external voice, shaping and judging its characters with ironic precision. In Ford, the situation is reversed. Verbally stunning, but a tissue of self-deception, a labyrinthine series of retreats from self-confrontation, The Good Soldier is not the narrative of an action at all; it is, rather, the record of a disturbed mind. (60) The Journal of Narrative Technique 9, no. 1 (1979): 53–60. See also Paul McCormick’s analysis of the relation between narratorial unreliability and its “claims of stable identify” in “Claims of Stable Identity and (Un)reliability in Dissonant Narration,” Poetics Today 30, no. 2 (2009): 317–52. 7 Ibid., 20–1. 8 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1955). 9 Ibid., 9. 10 Ibid. 11 In his extended analysis of differing modes of narratorial unreliability, James Phelan characterizes the Humbert narrator of Lolita as commingling two modes of unreliability that each have differing effects on readerly reception of the narrator’s pronouncements: Nabokov frequently employs estranging reliability, bonding unreliability, and a complex coding of some of Humbert’s other narration, a coding in which he gives the narration many marks of bonding unreliability but ultimately marks it as estranging unreliability. For the complex coding to work, its marks of bonding unreliability must be sufficiently persuasive that the authorial audience seriously considers moving closer to Humbert before estranging themselves from him. The combination of bonding reliability, estranging unreliability, and this complicated coding almost guarantees that many flesh and blood readers will be taken in by Humbert—and not just because they will miss the marks of the estranging unreliability. Flesh and blood readers will also be taken in because once any unreliability is detected it is easy to conclude that one is wise to the narrator’s tricks and therefore

NOTES  259

will not be taken in by them. (232; in “Estranging Unreliability, Bonding Unreliability, and the Ethics of Lolita,” Narrative 15, no. 2 [2007]) Daniel Newman adopts a notion of “Gradual and Dual Blues” to account for the Lolita narrator’s shifting modes of (un)reliability: The Gradual and Dual Blues serves as a crucial indicator of Humbert’s unreliability and as primary motivation for Nabokov’s use of unreliable narration. Like other forms of verbal irony, unreliability inheres in the ascertainable gap between what is said (by the narrator) and what is meant (as agreed upon by the implied author and the reader). Unable or unwilling to divide ‘the beastly’ from the “beautiful,” Humbert is a bad taxonomist. It is because he cannot, or will not, “fix” that crucial “borderline” that he permits himself to act as if there were no “point” (135) at which beauty becomes beastly. (54; in “Nabokov’s Gradual and Dual Blues: Taxonomy, Unreliability, and Ethics in Lolita,” Journal of Narrative Theory 48, no. 1 [2018]). In “How Unreliable Is Humbert in Lolita?” Journal of Modern Literature 25, no. 1 (2001), Anthony Moore also offers a theory of doubled narrators in Lolita as the source of the sense of unreliability: Put simply, we can view Humbert not only as the deceiving individual represented in much commentary, but as two narrators. Each is simultaneously present in the memoir, although each has a different interest in Dolores as his subject. On the one hand, he is the fully-grown degenerate character obsessed with pedophilia, his own glamorized leading man. On the other hand, he is the regenerate artist who, as we read, develops the integrated consciousness which fits him to complete the text. (73) 12 Nabokov, Lolita, 302.

Chapter 22 1 Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (New York: Penguin, 1990). 2 Ibid., 3. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid., 7. 6 Rita Felski analyzes The Buddha of Suburbia in terms of its representations of social class and mobility in “Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class,” PMLA 115, no. 1 (2000): 33–45. Ironically, perhaps, the narrator, Karim’s narration

260 NOTES

itself exceeds class while recognizing its effects, a multiple positioning that invites identifications and alliances. 7 Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, 15. 8 Ibid. 9 Kathy Acker, I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining, in Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels (New York: Grove Press, 1975), 91–184. 10 Ibid., 96. 11 Ibid., 99. 12 Ibid., 94.

Chapter 23 1 Edward Bernays, Propaganda (Brooklyn, NY: IG, 2005), 37. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 47. 5 Ibid., 40. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 47–8. 8 Ibid., 51. 9 Ibid., 52. 10 Ibid. 11 These headlines are from “The Great Depression: Newspaper Headlines from the Stock Market Crash (1929),” Click Americana, accessed September 26, 2018, https​://cl​ickam​erica​na.co​m/top​ics/m​ oney-​work/​great​-depr​es-si​on-ne​wspap​er-he​adlin​es-st​ock-m​arket​-cras​ h-192​9/2. 12 Life Magazine, October 8, 1956, 9. 13 Ibid., 17. 14 That advertisements deploy rhetorical modes make them a useful example for the study of language and rhetoric. As D. G. Kehl concludes in his “The Electric Carrot: The Rhetoric of Advertisement”: Even to suggest the almost limitless possibilities of language analysis in advertisement would consume reams of paper and hours of time. One can discuss examples of virtually every aspect

NOTES  261

of language: coinages, neologisms, including what Strunk and White call “the language of mutilation”; hackneyed and fresh diction, including arresting versions of old forms; usage and levels of diction, slang; irresponsible use of euphemism, jargon, gobbledygook; solecisms; linguistic stock response; what George P. Elliott calls “the language of ecstasy”; both verbosity and restraint, the impeccable succinctness which Barzun and Graff have noted in The Modern Researcher (New York: Harcourt, 1957); objectivity and subjectivity; the way language establishes tone, reveals voice, and is geared to its audience; sensory imagery; figurative language; etc. (140) In College Composition and Communication 26, no. 2 (1975): 134–40. 15 Life Magazine, October 8, 1956, 85. 16 Ibid., 12. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 177–90. 19 “USA Today Puzzles,” accessed December 18, 2018, https://puzzles. usatoday.com/. 20 National Geographic, October, 2010, 9. 21 Ibid.,147. 22 Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 2002), 1.

Chapter 24 1 Isaac Asimov, The Naked Sun (New York: Bantam, 1991), 15. 2 Stanley Kubrick, dir., 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood (Los Angeles: MGM, 1968). 3 “Who speaks (in the narrative) is not who writes (in real life) and who writes is not who is” comments Roland Barthes in “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” in, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 79–124. Barthes offers a footnote to this statement, citing Jacques Lacan: “Is the subject I speak of when I speak the same as the subject who speaks?” (111–12). 4 Stephen Beckett, “Robo-Journalism: How a Computer Describes a Sports Match,” BBC News, accessed September 27, 2018, https​://ww​ w.bbc​.com/​news/​techn​ology​-3420​4052.​

262 NOTES

5 “Robo-Journalism: Computer-Generated Stories May Be Inevitable, but It’s Not All Bad News,” The Conversation, accessed September 27, 2018, http:​//the​conve​rsati​on.co​m/rob​o-jou​rnali​sm-co​mpute​r-gen​erate​ d-sto​ries-​may-b​e-ine​vitab​le-bu​t-its​-not-​all-b​ad-ne​ws-89​473. 6 “Media Research: What Readers Think About Computer-Generated Texts,” EurekaAlert! accessed September 27, 2018, https​://ww​w.eur​ ekale​rt.or​g/pub​_rele​ases/​2016-​05/lm​-mrw0​50316​.php.​ 7 The first report is an example the BBC News analyzes in “RoboJournalism.” The second “No. 18 UNC Edges No. 5 Louisville on Marcus Paige’s Late Layup” is from ESPN, accessed September 27, 2018, http:​//www​.espn​.com/​ncb/r​ecap?​gameI​d=400​58790​7.

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INDEX

2001: A Space Odyssey  228 Acker, Kathy  207–9 I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac Imagining  207–9 admonishment  22, 119 ambiance  x, 2, 3, 63, 172–3, 177 ambiguity  4, 6, 10 ambivalence  6, 49, 83, 90, 131, 133–5, 154, 186 anticipation  81–3, 95, 97, 102, 112, 174, 180 anxiety  61, 103–4 Asimov, Isaac  226–9 The Naked Sun  226–9 atmosphere  xi, 2, 137, 174, 204 attitude  3, 13, 15, 17, 19, 22–3, 37–8, 53, 59, 63–4, 70, 83–4, 87, 97, 110, 113, 115, 132–3, 146, 161, 176, 186 audiation  x, 2, 12, 18–20, 22, 33–4, 38–9, 50, 53–5, 58–60, 64, 71, 73–4, 76, 92–3, 97, 100, 104, 110–13, 117, 127–8, 143, 145, 147, 157, 159, 161–2, 164–6, 180, 183, 198, 227–32 aura  2, 61, 86 Austen, Jane  97, 246 n.2 Pride and Prejudice  97–9 Austin, J. L.  54, 243 n.3 author  x–xi, 1–3, 6–7, 13–20, 22–9, 32–4, 40, 49, 53–6,

59, 64, 97, 127–8, 177, 183, 193, 207, 229–30 auxesis  10–11, 63, 71 Barthes, Roland  127, 183, 261 n.3 The Pleasure of the Text  127 S/Z  183 Bazin, André  26 Beckett, Samuel  171 Endgame  171 Bernays, Edward  211–14, 216, 219–20, 222, 224, 229–30 Propaganda  211–14, 229 bitterness  70, 72, 76, 86–8, 94, 139, 145, 166, 198, 202 Booth, Wayne C.  3, 13, 24–9, 53 The Rhetoric of Fiction  24, 235 n.3, 236 n.5, 237 n.3, 240 nn.4, 5 burlesque  66, 156 Calvino, Italo  127 If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler  127 chastising  117, 127 chiding  3, 12, 100 comedy  12, 16, 37, 40, 57, 59, 63–4, 79, 100, 109–10, 139, 150, 156 commentary  16–17, 36, 39, 46, 49, 63, 74–5, 92, 94–5, 109–11, 114–16, 138, 143,

INDEX

153, 156, 158–9, 170, 173, 181–2 community  122–5, 130, 164 computers  229–30, 233 condescension  117, 122, 145 confidentiality  37, 56, 95, 127 connotation  x, 2, 6–7, 20, 218, 229 Conrad, Joseph  2, 131, 138, 173 The Heart of Darkness  2, 61, 89, 92–5, 98, 114, 171–7, 255 n.5 The Nigger of the Narcissus  130–5, 137–40, 252 n.10 consciousness  25, 54–5, 60, 74–5, 77, 90, 110, 114–15, 168, 170, 177, 180, 182, 189, 208, 213, 228–9, 232 cynicism  115, 189, 192 Davidson, Cathy  121, 124–5, 250 n.17 Davis, Adelle  117–20, 124 Let’s Eat Right To Keep Fit  117–20 Derrida, Jacques  23, 55 detachment  14–16, 18, 71, 79, 81–2, 84, 92, 103, 113–15, 132 diary  56, 58–9, 89, 92, 95, 151–63, 189 diction  x–xi, 2, 4, 7, 19–20, 34, 53, 73, 87, 98, 113, 140, 162–3, 165, 177, 180 diegesis  x, 2, 24, 208 disappointment  87–8, 91, 95, 145, 156, 183, 198–9 disgust  93–5, 111, 113, 145, 155–6 displacement  14–15, 17, 70–1, 75, 114 dissonance  10, 36–7, 124

271

distance  11, 15, 19, 23, 28–9, 34, 73, 83, 98, 100–3, 108, 113–15, 129, 132, 138–40, 163–4, 176–7 Ellison, Ralph  167 “King of the Bingo Game”  167–70 Everett, Percival  41–51, 53, 179, 189 Erasure  47, 179–87, 189, 256 n.4 The History of the AfricanAmerican People [Proposed] As Told by Strom Thurmond  41–51 expectation  1, 11, 79, 81–2, 93, 97–9, 104, 116, 171, 174, 180–1, 183 fanaticism  118, 120 Faulkner, William  128 “A Rose for Emily”  128–30, 251 n.5 “Barn Burning”  148 Fielding, Helen  153 Bridget Jones’s Diary  153–6, 161–2, 254 n.3 first-person narrator  32–3, 35, 40, 43, 47, 63–4, 98, 122, 133–4, 138, 143, 151, 168–9, 179, 182, 184–6, 189–95, 197–208, 235 n.4 first person plural narrator  113– 26, 128–34, 138–41 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  193 Flaubert, Charles  26 Ford, Ford Maddox  127, 197 The Good Soldier  127, 197–200, 206, 257 n.2, 258 n.6 Forster, E. M.  114–16, 143 Aspects of the Novel  116–17

272 INDEX

Where Angels Fear To Tread  114–16, 249–50 n.3, 250 n.4 frame narration  98, 127 143, 162, 172–4 Frank, Anne  151 Frick, Robert  13–19 genre, xi, 1, 10, 55, 71–3, 75, 79, 92–3, 97–8, 184 Gibbons, Stella  64–8, 71–4 Cold Comfort Farm  64–8, 71–4, 80, 244 n.4 gloom  89–91, 94, 172, 175–7 Gordon, Edmund  33–4 Hemingway, Ernest  144, 190, 193, 195, 197 “Ford Madox Ford and the Devil’s Disciple”  193–5 “Hills Like White Elephants”  144–5, 253 n.2 A Moveable Feast  193 The Sun Also Rises  190–3, 256–7 n.3 Hite, Molly  21–3, 25, 239 n.7, 245 n.6 hoax  14, 17, 59–61, 106, 179–80 Hough Andrew  50 Hutchison, Linda  74, 244 n.10 hyperbole  63, 71, 109, 118, 124, 175 identity  16–18, 33, 134, 203, 207 impersonal  6, 141, 226–8, 232–3 interior monologue  162–3, 166–7, 169–70 irony  2, 16, 18, 23, 34, 37, 39, 57, 59, 63–5, 69–70, 73–7, 84–5, 97–103, 109–11, 115–16, 119, 127, 139–40,

159, 171, 187, 191, 200, 202, 213, 226, 230 dramatic irony  57, 59 Jacobson, Roman  17 jokes  2, 48, 58, 60, 156 journal  89, 91–3, 152, 179–80, 189 Karl, F. H.  19 Kaye-Smith, Sheila  71 Kincaid, James  41–51, 53 Kureishi, Hanif  203 The Buddha of Suburbia  203–8, 259–60 n.6 Lawrence, D. H.  64–5, 68–71, 73–7, 80–5, 87 The Fox  ix layering  26–7, 34, 37, 43, 54, 56, 59, 61, 67, 71, 74–5, 86, 94, 106, 155, 177, 182–3, 203, 208, 222, 228, 235 n.4 Life magazine  215–22 Loos, Anita  55–61, 63, 156 Gentlemen Prefer Blonds  55– 61, 63, 156–62 matter-of-fact  10–11, 36–7, 39, 66, 68, 71, 74, 79, 82, 84–5, 100–1, 129, 132, 174, 180–3, 201, 204, 232 Maugham, W. Somerset  146 The Razor’s Edge  146–7 melodrama  71–2, 74–6 mockery  37, 76 moebius  x, 123, 161–3, 187, 224 mood  x, 1–2, 19, 54, 63, 67, 165, 172 music  ix, 34, 104, 116, 137, 166 Nabokov, Vladimir  200

INDEX

Lolita  200–2, 206, 258–9 n.11 National Geographic  224–6 Nin, Anaïs  151 objectivity  6, 10, 13–15, 20, 68, 91, 114 O’Connor, Flannery  99, 247 n.4 “A Good Man Is Hard To Find,” 99–103, 146, 148 Otsuka, Julie  138 The Buddha in the Attic  138– 41 ouroboros  9, 11, 71, 102, 104, 200–1, 208 Parker, Dorothy  108–10, 147 “The Waltz”  108–11, 147, 249 n.4 parody  12, 39, 48, 56, 59, 66, 71–5, 98, 156 passive voice  5, 9–11, 81, 123, 129, 133, 211. 213, 227 performance  14, 19, 22, 32, 34, 37, 39, 40–1, 54–5, 59, 63, 100, 114, 128, 155, 177, 181–2, 185, 197, 219 performative  54, 121, 161, 163, 185, 197, 214 personality  x–xi, 2, 19, 33–4, 39–40, 42, 47, 54–5, 67, 69, 79, 86, 110, 113, 117, 140, 143, 151, 158, 161–3, 165, 179–81, 183, 185, 187, 193, 195, 205, 207, 228, 233 perspective  9, 87, 166, 169, 195 perversity  115, 202, 212 Phelan, James  22, 242 n.2 (ch. 6), 258–9 n.11 plot  xi, 1–2, 27, 55, 79, 97–8, 103–4, 177, 187, 195, 197 Poe, Edgar Allen  2

273

propaganda  211–14, 216–17, 219–22, 224–6 Rabinowitz, Peter  27 race  134, 180–3, 185, 189 repetition  48, 57, 60, 76, 82, 108, 110, 157, 166, 174, 201, 207, 225–6 resentment  155, 162, 166, 169, 186, 192–3 retroactive  4, 6, 34, 36–7, 39, 81, 84, 100–1, 111–12 retrospection  6–8, 58, 64, 67, 74, 79, 81, 84, 92, 97, 101, 110, 133, 152, 154, 166, 193, 197, 204, 241 n.11 reversal  68, 71, 73, 101, 119–20, 153, 162 rhetoric  x, 19, 75, 118, 120–5, 213, 217 robo-journalism  230–2 robot  xi, 227–31, 233 romance  75–6, 98, 114–16 Rosenblum, Lawrence  50 sanctimony  117–18, 120, 122 sarcasm  63, 95, 98, 118 sardonic  69–70, 75–7, 94–5 satire  12–13, 16, 41, 48, 64–6, 68, 72, 74–6, 154–5, 158, 183 Sedaris, David  29, 63 Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim  32 “Six to Eight Black Men”  29, 31–40 self-consciousness  16, 114–15, 182, 189 self-righteousness  117, 121–2, 146 setting  1–2, 74, 81, 98, 104, 173 sincerity  15, 17, 34, 37, 39, 64, 76, 79

274 INDEX

snideness  xi, 3, 19, 44, 46, 57, 119, 145 social class  1, 28, 57, 130, 147 Spark, Muriel  102–4 The Driver’s Seat  105–12, 248–9 n.2 Memento Mori  102–4, 247 n.6 Spiro, Lisa  123 Stein, Gertrude  193 stereotypes  74, 180 racial  180–4, 186, 189 Stoker, Bram  89–92, 152 Dracula  89–92, 98, 151–2, 161–2, 245 n.2 Stoppard, Tom  25 The Real Inspector Hound  25 style  ix, xi, 1–2, 13, 17–19, 42, 55–6, 71–2, 117, 177, 179–80, 201 suspense  81–2 syntax  x, xi, 4, 7, 14, 19–20, 34, 47, 53, 73, 87, 113, 140, 162–3, 165, 177, 180 third person narrator  21–2, 28, 63, 65, 86, 99–100, 103, 108, 114, 129, 131–4, 138, 140, 144, 167–70, 235 n.4 tragedy  64, 79–81, 83, 86–8, 97, 102–3, 111, 128–9, 135, 139

unconscious  23, 27, 49–50, 54–5, 89, 90, 97, 100, 109, 113, 116, 151, 160, 180, 183 understatement  36, 40, 109–10, 201 unreliable narrator  29, 199, 258 n.6, 259 n.11 voice  ix–x, 1–3, 13–15, 17–20, 22–4, 32–4, 36–7, 47–8, 53–5, 58–9, 63, 65, 79–81, 110, 113, 116, 128, 132, 166, 168, 180, 183, 199, 208, 228, 242 n2 (Ch 6), 247 n.6 Waugh, Evelyn  1–4 , 13, 16–19, 150 Scoop  1–11, 13, 19–20 Vile Bodies  150 Webb, Mary Gladys Meredith  71–3, 244 n.9 The House in Dormer Forest  71–3 Wells, H. G.  212–13 wit  40, 58, 156 Woolf, Virginia  22–3, 149, 163 Mrs. Dalloway  14, 85–8 The Waves  162–6 Wright, Richard  148 “The Man Who Was Almost a Man”  148

275

276