Contenu du sommaire : La voix dans la fiction américaine contemporaine.

Aside from would-be mimetic renderings of characters' voices in fictions, what is voice, in a literary text ? The concept is often used in literary studies but, being volatile, it is very seldom defined. Are there relations between the phone, the physical voice, and the literary « voice » or are we condemned to the metaphorical ? How legitimate is it to talk of the « voice of a text » ? Do we dream it ? Freely commenting on a collage of remarks culled from texts by a variety of writers, philosophers and critics, this introduction aims at framing the question debated throughout this dossier.

The object of this interpretation of Barthelme's short story « Sentence », is to go beyond the obviously meta-fictional aspects of the text, in which a sentence struggles to delay the inevitable moment of its death in the final full stop. The analysis of the « voice » in/of the sentence draws on the critical resources of enunciation linguistics, the theory of the relationship between language and death put forward by Giorgio Agamben, Bakhtinian dialogism, and W. Benjamin's theology of language. The personified sentence is seen to be a modern incarnation of Sheherazad.

D. Barthelme's use of « dreck » has already been much commented upon and his writings have sometimes been described as formalizations of his belief in the basic worthlessness of everyday language, which only the authorial structuring skill can counteract. Here is an attempt at showing how, in Overnight to Many Distant Cities, Barthelme succeeds in asserting the paramount power of technique and structure over the raw material he uses, i.e. words, and this with a view to achieving meaning.

The inscription of voices in Pynchon's texts serves a mutual subversion of the written and the spoken words which affects discursive mastery. In Gravity's Rainbow, impersonated or contaminated voices point to a haunting dispossession inflicted on the shifting addressees as well as on the reader. The voice of « We », carried and dissipated by Pynchon, is light with insignificance but sings that meaning resides neither in presence nor in death.

Southern literature, which is rooted in the tradition of story-telling/story-listening and repeatedly describes places and characters as being surrounded with a halo of echoes and stories, lends itself to an exploration of the essential interrelatedness of Voice and Fiction. A short examination of Foote's works reveals 1) that initiation into the realm of the written word often takes place only after the would-be novelist immerses himself in some sort of flumen verborum or exposes himself to an oracular voice echoing myths and legends — a necessary rite for the novelist to find his own authorial voice, 2) that fiction-writing is basically a vocal art and that voice, however ephemeral it may sound, is the unsubstantial fabric literature is made of.

End Zone may be read as the failure of two voices trying to assert their authority : the voice of the narrator, Gary Harkness, whose mastery over his own narrative is challenged by a parasitic, « authorial voice », and the voice of the single-minded coach, Creed, « a landlocked Ahab » embarked on the doomed pursuit of the original univocality of the Word. In a quasi-entropic movement, both voices, falling victims to « language's infinite treachery », lapse into silence.