SubStance

Reading Lydie Salvayre is principally a matter of listening. A clamor of voices resounds in her writings—voices of rage, of loathing, of indignation, of sorrow, of fear, of desperation. They shout, they whisper, they castigate, they wheedle, they condemn. Some voices are maddeningly prolix, others are painfully laconic; some offer carefully reasoned insight, others speak to say nothing; some emanate from the lower reaches of society, others from points of rare privilege. Often they are monological, either by choice or by force of circumstance; and frequently those voices are anonymous ones. Some speak in bleakly literalist terms, while others layer irony upon irony in a discourse that is hopelessly vexed. Sometimes, people speak constantly, but soundlessly, in a silence more deafening than the most strident voice imaginable. As often as not, nobody listens—except for us, if we are willing.

The notion of "voice" in literature is of course an exceedingly slippery one. Eric Prieto recently pointed out that the semantic field of that construct has been considerably expanded in our time: "No longer exclusively associated with the spoken word and performance, voice takes on the more general meaning of 'personal style,' that is, those elements of written elocution that give us access to the specific personality and 'thought patterns' of a writer" (285). Susan Lanser, for her part, argues that the construct means different things in different critical registers. When feminists invoke the idea of voice, for instance, they typically use it as a general, mimetic, and political term; when narratologists deploy it, they do so in ways that are specific, semiotic, and technical (4). Maurice Blanchot famously described narrative voice as something always emanating from an "elsewhere" with regard to the putative "where" of narrative. Conceiving stories as bounded, or "encircled," Blanchot suggests that narrative voice speaks from outside of those limits: "one gets the impression that someone is speaking from behind, prompting the characters, or the events, telling them what to say" (556-57).¹ If our reading necessarily encourages us to suspect the existence of such a point, however, its very eccentricity makes it all the more difficult to locate with any degree of precision. And the more closely we pursue it, the more quickly it [End Page 13] flees into indeterminacy and aporia, "as if the circle had its center outside of the circle, behind and infinitely behind, as if the outside were precisely that center which can only be the absence of any center" (Blanchot 557).²

The notion of a vocal "elsewhere" is thus a very thorny one, as appealing and full of promise as it may seem. In Lydie Salvayre's case, it is still more problematic by virtue of the fact that the wings of the stage upon which her fictions are played out are, with very few exceptions, extremely exiguous ones. Most of her texts provide us with pure discourse, a character speaking to an audience—or indeed into the wind. In either case, that "other" is very largely voiceless; and it is very rare that an authorial (or authoritative) narrative voice intervenes to mediate what is said.

Clearly, if voice is a difficult notion to theorize, so too is the idea of hearing. "How can one make a voice heard using only the tools of written language?" asks Jean Rousset (140). Rousset himself proceeds metaphorically and analogically, suggesting that voice is like song, and relying upon the lexicon of music. Obviously, it is also very much a question of the ear, which Jacques Derrida describes as the most uncanny of organs since, while we can listen carefully or not at all, the ear is nonetheless always in a sense "open," always "offered" (Otobiographies 103). Rousset argues that Proust's ear is exceptionally fine-tuned: "Proust is not only a linguist (though untutored), he is a subtle acoustician, gifted with an ultrasensitive ear when his characters speak; he senses their phonic nuances, giving each a voice, which reveals those characters as much and better than the words the character speaks" (136). It is legitimate, I think, to make the same sort of claim for Salvayre's ear. As a practicing psychiatrist, she...