Page 22 - WTP Vol. V #2

James Earl Jones. Churchill. Martin Luther King. Think of broadcasters like Edward R. Murrow
or Barbara Walters. The thunder throat of Don LaFontaine, who recorded 5,000 movie trailers. Sometimes their delivery impresses us more than content; or content more than delivery. Our presi- dents often need voice coaches or spokespeople or both. In most cases, natural voices are ampli- fied and modulated, if not distorted, by electron- ics. Of course, purely depersonalized machine voices have their uses too: “No one can come to the phone right now.”
writing voice? There is no audible sound, except for recorded books. Our librarians whisper, “Si- lence, please!” Children are read to at first, then learn to sound out words, to read out loud, and finally to read to themselves. Words on the page, sentences, syntax, diction, punctuation, stresses and rhythms: all somehow combine. We make sense of them.
We delight in impressionists who evoke well- known speakers, somehow capturing their inflec- tions. Likewise we applaud the ventriloquist, as she throws her voice, and with her hidden hand opening and closing her dummy’s jaw, convinces us that the dummy speaks and has its own voice and personality.
Experienced authors tell their students to find their own voices. F. Scott Fitzgerald advised his daughter: “You learn by trying the sound and stance of other writers. You develop an ear, through your reading and imitating, for how good writing is supposed to sound.” But if we absorb the manners of other writers and follow only their eyes, ears, and values, we end up doing impressions, if not deliberate parodies. Heming- way warns his acolyte Arnold Samuelson: “don’t ever imitate anybody. All style is, is the awkward- ness of a writer in stating a fact. If you have a way of your own, you are fortunate, but if you
Signing is voice for the speech-and-hearing-im- paired, and each speaker expresses his or her emphasis through the vocabulary and rhythms of common hand signs. A song in signs looks like ballet, at least from the waist up. When a cast of deaf actors performs an entire play in signs, their audience raises its hands and shakes them for visual applause.
try to write like somebody else, you’ll have the awkwardness of the other writer as well as your own”—a lesson Hemingway may have learned from sounding too much like Sherwood Ander- son in “My Old Man.” As Anne Lamott puts it in her writing manual, Bird by Bird: “The truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice.”
If we speak with a common voice, we agree in will, agenda, or opinion. We may even chant in unison. The people may have a voice through elected or paid representatives (“My lawyer voiced my concerns”), the press, or social media. Give me your voice, says the politician. All in favor, say aye. Speak now or forever hold your peace. “What she said,” he said. On the individual level, in a babble of dissent, only the loudest voice gets heard. Cup your hands, grab the microphone, or bull horn, or megaphone. Or sometimes, a picture or action speaks louder than words. The Buddhist monk, doused in gasoline, strikes his match.
“An authentic/fresh/original new voice,” pro- 13 claim publishers of first novelists. But what is a
Along with the individual, whole populations, otherwise submerged or marginalized, can be voiced as literature. One such voice represents and encourages others, speaking for and to, and granting due regard: Zora Neale Hurston’s, say. Working class voices, women’s voices, immigrant voices, a new generation’s voices; the formerly unspeaking or unheard.
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“Voice” for some critics refers to style, Cicero’s or Seneca’s, ornate or plain, although A. Alvarez warns us about mistaking “mere style for voice” (The Writer’s Voice). Still other critics equate voice with vision, or persona, or the “implied au- thor.” For Wayne C. Booth, “A work of fiction has the sense not only of timbre and tone of a speak- ing voice, but of a total human presence.”
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