Polyvocal [1]
1.
Recently, Roxane Gay used the term polyvocal on her blog, The Audacity.1
It was new to me, but seemed a tidy name for a distinction between two kinds of novel—ones with a solitary/singular/unified voice, and ones with an array of voices—cacophonous or harmonious, sequential/nonsequential . . . Also, I like its echo of polyphony.2
Back in January, I posted a three-parter about voice:
. . . which included some thoughts on multi-voice narration. Today, I want to go a little deeper.
[Note: If you’re new to David’s Lists 2.0, I urge you to check out this set of posts— “voice” being the bull’s eye in my thinking about how fiction works.]
2.
I’ll start with two ideas, one personal, one historical.
a) The personal: In the early 1990s, I found myself in possession of a two-book contract with Scribner: the book of stories I had in hand, and a novel-to-be-written.5
I came of age at a time when writing a novel seemed the equivalent of climbing the Matterhorn. Even to imagine myself a novelist seemed fatuous, self-delusional, etc. I knew for certain I had nowhere near the ego-strength for such an expedition.6
Except now there was no getting out of it.
If it’s all the same to you, I’ll skip the angsty melodrama (yikeswhatdoIwriteabout??) and zero in why I’m telling you this: My short stories almost always had a single focal character. There was a supporting cast, but the question: Whose story is it? never arose. Novels can be built the same way, of course—one POV (either first-person or third-, limited to one consciousness/perspective).
But that’s not what I did.
I had a Montana story (set in the early 1950s) too fresh to be in the collection, so I tried it out as The Novel, Part One, then blipped ahead six years to see what had become of my characters. That’s where I ran into a conundrum I hadn’t seen coming, one that seemed really foundational. My central character, Mark, is married to one of four sisters who, with their father, own the Vagabond Cafe.7 I decided to open the story up by giving POV chapters to other characters (one perspective per chapter—the short-story writer’s method), starting with the least-obvious choice, Helen, the youngest sister.
With these competing angles, I felt lost for a time: Whose book was it? Looking back, I’m amazed this troubled me. It’s easy enough, now, to say:
The Falling Boy shows what happens to the Stavros family when a) the cafe closes for good, and b) Mark has an affair with his wife’s Bohemian older sister, Linny.
As the lists in this post will show, there are multiple ways to multiply points of view in novels, but the most basic question remains: One or many? My novel turned out to be a pretty simple artifact, but finding the through line or unifying element at the core of complex, layered or fragmentary or elusive books is often much trickier.8 I’ve come to believe that univocal novels and polyvocal novels are different species altogether.
b) The historical: Just as Picasso’s “Guernica”9 or Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” were was unimaginable fifty years earlier, the modernism of the early and mid-20th C. (then post-modernism, post-post-modernism, etc.) exploded the formal possibilities for novelists.
As recently as the mid-1980s, when Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine appeared, people were still arguing about whether a group of stories with interlocking characters could be called “a novel.” Novels-in-stories has become a familiar, uncontroversial term—click here for a quick list of some.10 We can even consider some collections, marketed as collections, to be novels—Denis Johnson’s, Jesus’ Son (1992) being a famous case.
Over the past few decades, the iterations of “novel” have become wonderfully diverse. Some examples:
Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, Leanne Shapton (2009):
The auction catalog of a couple’s belongings that manages to tell the tale of their uncoupling.
I, the Divine, Rabih Alameddine (2001):
Each chapter is a fresh attempt to get her story off the ground—hence the book’s subtitle: A Novel in First Chapters.
This Is Not a Novel, David Markson (2001):
I wrote about this one last year in Reading Projects [7] Oddball Novels. Here’s the note from that post.11
Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1972):
A re-imagining of the Marco Polo saga, but each city is fantastical.
[A bunch more here:12.]
3.
If the first thing to say about polyvocal novels is that they’re told from multiple angles, the second is: Why? What is there about a particular story that demands more than one voice? What purpose has brought these voices together?
Let’s start with a couple: We can get the story from one side, but the dynamic’s tastier, less settled, if we hear both: his side vs. her side (pronoun these however you wish). This is a versus story; versus stories typically have a winner (though many have two losers). But even here there are options: Maybe the victory is Pyrrhic (in winning you lose), or it turns out not to be a versus story after all, but a one-plus-one (the birth of a team?). Or the outcome propels one (or both) of the twosome into a new state, a new calling, a new quest. This X vs. Y is really the prolog to a further story (whether shown, or just suggested). Or there’s some other twist, as in The Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk, 1996), where we learn that X and Y are aspects of a single man.13
In other words, X vs. Y may seem binary, but is often dialectical: statement, anti-statement, synthesis. From the collision of opposites a third thing emerges. We see it over and over. A storyteller puts her character in jeopardy, fixing our attention on yes/no—will she win the match/get the guy or gal/escape captivity/be given the antidote in time/make it to shore? Yes/no is the stuff of mass market entertainment. Writers of literary fiction typically transcend this paradigm. Often, while making us think we have a Yes/No situation, they surprise us with something else, a third thing.14
To summarize: By its nature, a story with two perspectives wants to pit one against the other, but even here in the most-basic polyvocal set-up, we find variations that undermine this expectation.
4. A Matter of Time
Sometimes the split personality of a novel comes not from two people in the here and now, but from two (or more) planes of time.
For instance, in both So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell, 1980)15 and Ottessa Moshfegh’s, Eileen (2015), a character relates a personal story from a time well removed from the events. These are looking-back stories. The two planes of time—the X/Y—are the now and the then, the when lived vs. the remembered. In some novels, the discrepancy between the two is the point of the story—the voice of the narration in the now is constantly there, interpreting, assessing. In others, the looking back is established, then we watch the past, told in the voice of the older character, but with just enough now commentary to remind us that it’s a looking back.16
In other cases, the time planes are farther apart and involve different sets of characters. They may be connected by blood, as in Finding Your Roots scenarios, or by some other fact/affinity/circumstance.
Here are a few of these gambits:
A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), Walter M. Miller’s post-nuclear war novel17: Three sections: Fiat Homo [26th Century], Fiat Lux [Year 3174], Fiat Voluntas Tua [Year 3781].
Seveneves, Neal Stephenson (2015):
The moon breaks apart. Humanity manages to save seven Eves, who establish a torus of colonies tethered high above Earth as the planet recovers from the inferno that ensued when the moon fragments struck it. In two time planes: Near-future, then five thousand years later.18
Red Shift, Alan Garner (1973):
Three time planes, united by physical location [Barthomley in Chestershire, North Central England]: a) in the Romano-Britain period, b) during the English Civil War, and c) modern day.
Possession, A. S. Byatt (1990)19:
Here’s Wiki’s thumbnail: . . . follows two modern-day academics as they research the paper trail around the previously unknown love life between famous fictional poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. . . . set both in the present day and the Victorian era, contrasting the two time periods, as well as echoing similarities and satirising modern academia and mating rituals.
Unlike the three novels above, in which the time planes are discrete units, Byatt moves back and forth throughout.
A Tale For the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki20 (2013):
A troubled second-generation Japanese girl, uprooted from California when her family moves back to Japan. She keeps a diary, later discovered (having been washed away by the Japanese tsunami) by a writer living off the coast of British Columbia who tries to investigate the girl’s life.
I believe I’ve tried your patience enough for one day.
Polyvocal [2] will be up next week and will involve a rabble of multiple narrators, starting (of course) with:
See you then.
A piece about multiple-narration by Sophie Ward [Love and Other Thought Experiments (2021)]in LitHub:
https://lithub.com/multiple-narrators-multiple-truths-a-reading-list/
And the Birth Year Project: is still open for business . . .
You supply your birth year, I respond with a short list of books published that year—the popular/well-known titles first, then some books I'd recommend. If your year's already been done, I'll do an update. So far, we’ve done 19 years altogether, between 1944 and 1989.
[See BYP Index in navigation bar. Note: Due to a problem I’ve yet to solve, the list atop the Index is incomplete—several of the newest years aren’t included.]
Extra credit: You read one of the books (ideally one you're unfamiliar with), then tell me what you thought. If we get enough of these, I'll aggregate and post.
Polyphony: I’m no historian of music, but it was a big deal when singing solo or in unison evolved into harmony singing—Gregorian chant, then early polyphony, motets and so on, then, over centuries, the astonishing complexity/heterogeneity of today’s soundscape.
[As I was typing this, I thought: . . . whereas religion evolved from polytheism to monotheism.]
[If you’re me, you hope it eventually evolves into non-theism.]
Voice #2: A catalog/bestiary of multi-voice types in fiction.
Voice #3: A list of forty-some “voicey” novels.
Blue Spruce [stories] (1995), The Falling Boy (1997).
Ego-strength: My ego-strength was running on fumes, true, but that’s not the point of this footnote. Rather, it’s this: When my synapses are firing properly, I remember Strunk & White [Elements of Style], Point 12: Put statements in positive form. So a moment ago I edited a sentence you just read.
a) I knew for certain I didn’t have anywhere near the ego-strength for such an expedition.
b) I knew for certain I had nowhere near the ego-strength for such an expedition.
[Notice how the second one’s almost an inch shorter? And more confident-sounding?]
[Oh, and I’d already taken out a “that” (“I knew for certain [that] I—) because of a different self-instruction: If removing a “that” doesn’t change the meaning or sound awkward, remove it.]
Four sisters:
Unifying idea: It’s a real treat to take part in the gyrations of wickedly complicated books—not simply long ones like Les Misérables or War and Peace, but ones like those in:
https://longd.substack.com/p/reading-projects-3-big-hard-novels
But what a letdown when you read and read and read, waiting for the spot where the dust clears, the path narrows, the très cool revelation is laid bare . . . and instead the book just ends—thumb on nose, fingers wiggling (Fooled ya, I was just screwing around the whole time!) My final interaction with Thomas Pynchon was launching the 1100-page Against the Day across the room. Sayonara, old conjurer.
“Guernica”: When I was teaching I tried to explain that the best art is saturated with what it’s about. Cut it open and it’s itself all the way through. I used to say: Isolate any part of “Guernica,” and you find “Guernica”—wherever you look, Guernica.
Novels-in-stories:
Choose This Now, Nicole Haroutunian (2024)
Light Skin Gone to Waste, Toni Ann Johnson (2022)
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsum (2022)
Night of the Living Rez, Morgan Talty (2022)
A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan (2010)
Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich (1984, rev. 1993, rev. 2009)
Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan (1967)
I, Robot, Isaac Asimov (1950)
The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury (1950)
Markson: Toward the end of his writing life, Markson wrote four books known as The Notecard Quartet. They consist of snippets of fact and commentary about writers, writers’ deaths, about the project you’re reading, and so on—terse fragments, many to a page. This Is Not a Novel was the first I read and remains my fave—though you could read all four together as a single work. The others: Reader’s Block (1996 ), Vanishing Point (2004), and The Last Novel (2007). These may be an acquired taste, but I love them. I love the way ideas/facts/statements rise and fall and how despite being told that it’s not a novel [this is just a feint, really, homage to Magritte’s painting of a pipe that isn’t a pipe, and, before that, Diderot’s story “Ceci n’est pas un conte”] it succeeds in being a novel, IMHO. Embedded, like an armature, is the Latin phrase, Timor mortis conturbat me, a refrain from medieval poetry, The fear of death disturbs me.
Other Odd Constructions:
The Last One, Fatima Daas (2020). [English translation by Lara Vergnaud (2021)]:
A novel-in-verse.
Love and Other Thought Experiments, Sophie Ward (2020)
Just like it sounds, a novel made of philosophical what-ifs;
Twenty-One Truths About Love, Matthew Dicks (2019)
Diary of days, compendium of lists.
Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher (2014)
Satire of academia in the form of letters/emails.
The Interrogative Mood, Padgett Powell (2009)
Do you think it’s possible to write a novel made entirely of questions?
Einstein’s Dreams, Alan Lightman (1993)
Each chapter, a dream Einstein might’ve had about the nature of time while developing his special theory of relativity in 1905.
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979)
Begins with a great meta move: You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler . . . launching you—that is, us—into a labyrinth of versions of the novel you/we are trying to read.
The Fight Club: This revelation always reminds me of certain films: Primal Fear (1996), in which Edward Norton’s character has a multiple personality—young doofus on the outside, sly killer within—when in fact only the sly killer is real, the doofus a convincing pose. Which then reminds me of the gobsmaking reversals at the end of The Sixth Sense (1999), Passengers (Anne Hathaway, 2008), The Others (Nicole Kidman, 2001) . . . and, of course, The Usual Suspects (1995).
The third thing: I call this the A vs. B = C . . . especially when it ends the story.
In one of my early stories, a truck driver survives an accident that should’ve killed him; he’s presented with a choice: Go home to his old life or Go off and start a new life. He chooses C: Go home and start a new life.
I loved how this worked in William Trevor’s novel, Felicia’s Journey (1994)—will Felicia survive her entrapment by a man we know to be a serial killer? I won’t tell you what happens . . . except to say that the title’s meaning finally comes into focus,
William Maxwell: I used to say this was my favorite novel, then I read Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree (1979), and though the two novels are worlds apart, I settled for a tie. Maxwell was a long-time fiction editor at The New Yorker. A small, tidy Midwesterner, revered by a scads of terrific writers—I met him once, bumbled my way through a few moments of hero worship, apologized for the bumbling, which he kindly defused. There’s plenty more to say about him . . . but not here. If you’ve yet to read So Long, See You Tomorrow . . . why not find a spot for it on your TBR list (near the top would be good).
Looking back: In the film of Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel, Little Big Man (1970), 111-year-old Jack Crabb (last survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn) tells his story to an interviewer, then disappears until the very end, but his craggy, 111-year-old voice pops in every so often, reminding us we’re being shown a story from way-back time. Which is exactly what doesn’t happen in The Usual Suspects (1995)—the ending achieves its wonderfulness because, though it’s been established early on that we’re hearing a story, we forget that everything we’re seeing is just that, a story—we’ve been sandbagged, just like the detective who hears it from a world-class unreliable narrator. On the off-chance you’ve never seen this, the final shots—the feet of a man walking down the sidewalk, then getting into a car, are pure genius.
Liebowitz: Wiki calls this a “fix-up novel”—constructed of three short fictions not originally intended as part of the same project (they list several dozen of these, including Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957), Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971), and Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010). Liebowitz is a fantastically popular work, never out of print, winner of 1961 Hugo Award.
Seveneves: Something about this didn’t work for my sci-fi-reading older son (now middle-aged, egad), but I’ve read it twice (so far) . . . the second time I was lying in bed and thought I’d remind myself how it started, then was hooked anew.
Byatt: Winner of 1990 Booker.
Ozeki: I just learned that she’s American/Canadian, that she was a filmmaker/TV writer-producer of some renown before becoming a novelist, that she’s an ordained Buddhist priest. Her most recent novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021) is about eight inches down in the TBR stack beside my chair.
David, I'm taking this as a sign. Last week I thought, maybe it's time to dive back into that novel draft I set aside a dozen years ago, the one with nine different POV characters/voices. Then a wonderful interview with Jennifer Egan about Goon Squad popped up in my podcasts (NYT Book Review) and got me REALLY thinking about it. Then your polyvocal post appeared in my inbox. And so I am delving into that set-aside manuscript, thinking about why these nine voices and what is it that emerges from their combined perspectives and experiences. Eagerly awaiting polyvocal[2]. Thanks for your thought-provoking insights and writerly wisdom.
I really enjoyed Ruth Ozeki’s book and plan to look at these other ‘non conventional noveli’ novels that you’ve added here.
Would also love to read your book(s)!