Puerility as a Voice

A surprising number of contemporary British novelists have no ‘voice’. Not to name any names. But compare the Americans. McCarthy; DeLillo; Ford; Salter, who write prose with a distinctive human stamp: books suited to being read aloud. I am about halfway through a sequel to The Graduateby a writer whose best instincts take him toward pure dialogue. If life is becoming increasingly ‘contextless’ -– then it is in the human voice that something of a counterbalance to that loss can be found, a resource finely exploited by all these writers. In the recognition that one is hearing someone speak, there is also the recognition that here at least is someone who exists! The ‘loss of story’ or the so-called ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ that is said to characterise much of modern cultural life illustrates the theme that this engages with generally.  For this process excludes the very possibility of culture - so to speak. Caulfield demonstrates this rather abstract idea very well: he hates everything: religion, culture, tv, life, society, school, mum, dad, etc. The kind of Catcher in the Rye style novel of disaffection that shows the hero cut off from life, cut out from it, ‘contextless’, needs the counterbalance of Caulfield’s distinctive narrative voice to make it live; he has to be real - knowable. The irredeemably disaffected Caulfield, expelled from Pency, has gone on a wilful self-destructive binge, wandering from place to place, talking, drinking, whoring, running away, and generally living in a world in which the key is homelessness, in which nothing is likeable, without amenity: even though, or because, he is moneyed and privileged.  The problem is context and the lack of real meaning, that there is no real story for him (that David Copperfield crap); being phoney, it makes him feel nauseated — and yet the counterbalance, as it were, is the very ’sound’ of this - this vocal noise, this image of what it is for the individual to be alive now. We need to be able to hear him because thus he exists; since he exists in spite of himself; against everything. I find certain similarities in Charles Webb’s Home School. ‘Nature’s register’ is the human voice. In other words, for there is nothing real besides - nothing that means anything beyond this, the voice’s mere material fact. Voicelessness here means mannerlessness, puerility.  The inability to conceive of a believable social reality.  Caulfield lives for us, as Benjamin also lives for us, because a form of mannerliness seduces him: if in nothing else then in the sound of this voice complaining at its voicelessness; crying for the scruple of human taste.  Unable to evolve any sort of conduct beyond that which demonstrates a new kind of now world chic the only thing left to him in these is its rejection and the evolution of a voice that works through this rejection. He complains, volubly and at length, and so finally is successful: yes, yes, he exists.  So, voice and place. Haunted by the Spectre of Vulgarity, doomed to fade into the gigantism of an Advert, complaint in mourning its absence of manners establishes a new order of one. 

Tags: Advertising, British Novelists, The Voice