ROUGH DRAFT My Nifty 3-Axis Model of Narrative Voice

Aware of the dangers of theory and schematic reduction, I have come up with a nifty way of mapping any character’s “voice” relative to three crossing axes. To rescue that from abstraction, let me explain:

Every person, including fiction characters, has a distinctive ‘voice’, or characteristic way of thinking, speaking, and writing. But it can be very difficult to point to or describe what sets that voice apart from others. Some characteristics are obvious, but others aren't. In Huckleberry Finn, Jim speaks with an accent, Mark Twain’s conception of the speech of an uneducated slave of that time. That much is obvious. But how do we know he is intelligent and perceptive if his diction is uniformly simple, his syntax is unsophisticated, and his manners always show deference to Huck, who we know to be in no way Jim’s superior? Jim’s qualities are deeply embedded in his voice, and his voice is made of particular ways with diction, syntax, and prosody.

In some cases, a single book contains an extreme range of voices. Moby-Dick probably best exemplifies this. Queequeg barely speaks English, really does little more than grunt, but his humanity and intelligence are never in question. Perhaps paradoxical is that Ahab speaks in great, hyper-articulate outpourings of the richest language, but his humanity, and certainly his judgment, are very much in question. Melville used a wide range of voices to illuminate character.

But what, exactly, are the variables in voice? I’ve mentioned diction and syntax, but these are linguistic categories, pretty abstract, and maybe not be helpful to writers. So I’ve come up with the following as a way of helping myself, as a writer, be clearer about how different characters’ voices differ.

Picture a graph with three axes.

The first axis represents a continuum of diction, defined by Greco-Latin on one end and Anglo-Saxon on the other. In English, we have use of an enormous range of words that we've adopted over the long, mongrel history of the language. Generally, our Anglo-Saxon words are short and concrete and, when we choose to use them, we convey a sense of uncomplicated empirical know-how and a tacit relationship to solid objects and discreet things. And our Greco-Latinate words are mostly polysyllabic and abstract, and convey a sense of a learned, theoretical, and often intellectual or spiritual approach to a topic. And we can mix these up, often to pungent or humorous effect. It feels unremarkable, at least among scholars of architecture, to say, for example: “The possibility of replacing the poetics with an architecture based solely on relations had a further result…” But replace the learned, Greek, abstract architecture with the blunt, solid, specific Anglo-Saxon hut, and you end up with a funny collision between the abstract and the concrete, or maybe between the high and the low. One doesn't normally speak of “a hut based solely on relations”, but to do so is squarely within the possibilities of English diction, and diction is a potent tool of writing. The writer’s use of diction in narrating a character is rich with possibility, and diction can reveal a wide range of character traits, from level of education to degree of humility and familiarity with things.

The second axis represents a continuum between hypotaxis and parataxis, which are learned Greek words that describe syntactic structures that, on the one hand, are full of subordinate clauses, which show the author’s explanation and interpretation of events; and, on the other hand, that are full of parallel constructions that tend to simply report on events without comment or causal explanation. Flaubert, Henry James, and Virginia Wolff mostly wrote hypotactic prose. For example, Henry James:

The ideally handsome way is for him to multiply in any given connexion all the possible sources of entertainment—or, more grossly expressing it again, to intensify his whole chance of pleasure. (It all comes back to that, to my and your “fun”—if we but allow the term its full extension; to the production of which no humblest question involved, even to that of the shade of a cadence or the position of a comma, is not richly pertinent.)

This extremely hypotactic prose is full of fine abstract distinctions, precise observations and categorizations, qualifications, and levels of subordinate structures that show a fastidious concern for conceptual precision and subtle social meaning.

But parataxis looks like this:

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There'd be no surviving another winter here.

Instead of James’ layers of subordinate clauses, Cormac McCarthy gives us series of phrases strung together by conjunctions, usually and. Not only is McCarthy uninterested in telling us what things mean, or how the characters experience them, or how they feel, but he is unwilling to even rank the characters’ observations according to any moral or aesthetic standard beyond good and bad. The characters, in The Road, live in a world that is no longer concerned with fine distinctions or with degrees of sophistication or with cultural categories. The world is a threat, and the characters scan it for danger and for food. The parataxis of this paragraph contains, in its form, the bleakness of reality, in which cultural categories of all kinds are suspect, and the best a character can do is rely on his unprejudiced observations to survive. The Road is not a Henry James drawing room.

In locating his prose, or his character’s speech along the axis of hypotaxis to parataxis, the writer is showing how much the character trusts the fine distinctions and categories of the culture. The hypotactic structure tends to show a certain comfort with the cultural categories and distinctions, and a certain confidence that these are for the best, and that they will support the good life. Hypotaxis tends to be the voice of the haves. Educated, flourishing, genteel, lucky people have been so supported by their education and by the sophisticated distinctions it provides, that they habitually turn to this prose of causality and explanation, with all its tidiness and propriety. Parataxis, though, shows a deep distrust of the world’s friendliness or meaning. It shows the world as a dangerous, inhospitable place that is beyond real comprehension, except in the most mechanical ways, and tends to put little trust in the subtle shadings of meaning that culture upholds. So, a character who speaks paratactically, as in McCarthy or Hemingway, for example, communicates a sense that his opinions and preferences are of little concern, because he has learned, through raw experience, that the world is hostile. And, of course, a writer can move along this continuum at will, depending on which character is speaking or what situation he finds himself in. Faulkner did this lots.

The third axis, the Z axis, is the continuum between plain, lucid language and denser, ranker, more poetic language. Simple, declamatory, unelaborated language tends to be associated with storytelling, or with a concern with plot, and is designed to not get in the way of the story. The author’s goal is to disappear, and to craft such frictionless prose that the reader hardly thinks about the language, per se, and is able to focus, without distraction, on the flow of events. Lucidity is the goal. Richard Lanham calls this “through” prose. It is like a window. The reader looks through it, and, if the writer has scrupulously cleaned the glass of his prose, the reader will not even notice that the glass is there. In some writing, however, the writer writes assertive prose that is a goal in its own right. Sometimes the plot becomes so secondary to the writing that it can be hard to follow. But, if done well, the writing can enrich and add meaning to the plot in ways that lucid prose never can. Rich, non-standard diction and syntax can be difficult, and the author can embed layer upon layer of intertextual meaning, allusions to other works that will inform the educated reader. Also, this kind of writing, which Richard Lanham calls “at” writing, because the reader looks at it, instead of through it, can have its own beauty and power outside the story. Faulkner, again, was one of the great writers of poetic prose. It can be hard going, but some of the most beautiful and rewarding prose in English is a result.

So, again, picture the three-axis graph. It looks like a cube. Any point inside that cube represents a certain character’s particular use of diction, parataxis or hypotaxis, and plainness or rankness of speech. Each of these continua locates the speaker in ways that reveal character. For example, when we read Virginia Wolff’s rendering of Mrs Dalloway’s speech, we hear a cultured but unfastidious diction; we hear an extremely hypotactic tendency to qualify, judge, requalify, equivocate, postulate, assert and retract, and sift observations for fine social significances; and we hear a generally plain language that becomes poetic and more difficult when the character experiences anxiety. Her class (upper), her education (Edwardian and feminine), and her state of mind (expectant, often flustered, preoccupied with social distinctions) and much more is revealed in the voice Wolff gave her. And, maybe an extreme example, when Faulkner writes Benjy Compson, we get a very limited, flat, concrete diction; we get a paratactic regularity and simplicity that is free of verbal judgment (but not at all free of feeling); and we get such plain language that it goes round the bend into a kind of opacity, a poetry of retardation.

So, I think this three-axis model, this cube, can be a useful device for being clear about how and why your character speaks. Any idiosyncrasy, and verbal eccentricity, occupies a position within the cube, albeit blurred and mobile. As a way of disciplining, or testing, the words of a character, you can locate that speech along each of these three axes. It can help point out inconsistencies and it can help guide decisions. Your ear, of course, is the best guide, but sometimes it’s helpful to step back and ask yourself Why did she suddenly use this highfalutin word? Why does he describe this landscape paratactically? And is there a narrative purpose to this use of poetic language, and is it justified? I like to have a schematic model to fall back on when I can’t trust my ear, or when I’m stumped.