Finding a Form, by William Gass - Dalkey Archive

[alice wellintown]

. . .a concept crucial to our understanding of literature and its
effects is "voice." Even when we write in the first person and
construct a voice of our invented narrator to speak in, there is
always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: he author's
voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking--Lear or Hamlet
or Juliet--that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream
they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James,
of Flaubert, or Faulkner, in each red necked, red-earthed farmer, in
every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.

"Finding a Form," p.44 _Finding a Form_, William H. Gass

This is as old as literature: Shakespeare's characters sound like
themselves and always like Shakespeare, too. It is not really Cornwall
who wonderfully calls Gloucester's eye a "a vile jelly" before he rips
it out--though Cornwall speaks the words--but Shakespeare, who has
provided the phrase.        A contemporary writer like David Foster
Wallace wants to push this tension to limit. He writes from within his
characters' voices and simultaneously over then, obliterating them in
order to explore larger, if more abstract, questions of language.

"David Foster Wallace," p.30 _How Fiction Works_,   James Wood


The ugly language of the media saturated American postmodernist novels
is certainly evident in IV.   What Gass identifies as the "overvoice"
is now, in the Pynchon-led American project, a voice over. And it
makes for ugly reading if we need to put up with more than a page or
two at a time.

In any event, I thought I would mention this aspect of the
"Voice-Over" because we need to identify this element and how it
functions in IV because of the impact it has on our reading the
distance between the implied author and his norms and the unreliable
third-person limited narrative of Doc.

Also, no one can complain about flat characterizations in a
third-person limited narrative. It comes with the territory.
Cartoons are another matter.