Yesterday I posted the word “aspectabund”, an adjective which means being possessed of a face that shows emotions clearly.
Between then and now I have been contemplating anonymity. This blog is nameless if a name should denote a specific human identity. For those of you reading this, though, ‘notalltheenglishdrinktea’ functions just as a name would. One can only hide from those who (we believe) know of one’s existence. Progress then from anonymity to facelessness. I have an identification tag. What I lack is an age, a gender, an employment, an history. I’d imagine some of those to be deducible; others perhaps less so. The question of whether they are relevant is a different matter. Of course, I believe they are relevant; the degree of and reason for this relevance, however, while more interesting, is something I don’t intend to pursue here.
There is a gulf, therefore, between utterance and origin, like the thoughts of a narrator. There’s an author at work, but although his originating causality is everywhere inscribed in the literary work, it is simultaneously absent from the text. The causal chain hits the first level narrator and then turns a corner, or extends into the fog.
Writing, therefore, as narrator rather than author, I can exert greater control on the output. Theoretically. I can assume a voice, I can distort my own voice. I can form whatever narrator-persona I am capable of. Yet, to return to “aspectabund”, from what type of face does my voice originate? Or, more accurately, what type of face does my voice have, or indeed is my voice? Does it give away my emotions, does everywhere exude slight traces of what I think theoretically suppressible?
Undoubtedly.
Of course, what is less clear, for the Other involved, is what is controlled and what is unintentional. Of course, each act of control yields information about the controlling force and agent at work. Understanding information though, fortunately, is far harder and inevitably imprecise.
And, of course, this whole discussion rests on a false notion of the author being a unity behind the narrator. The author is just as slippery a concept. There’s no unified ‘I’ resident in me. I can never truly assume a voice that is not my own, nor assume a voice that is. The argument just doesn’t quite align with the reality of identity, whatever that may be.
notalltheenglishdrinktea 