The Voice in Twentieth-Century English Short Fiction: E.M. Forster, V.S. Pritchett and Muriel Spark

• Autores: Jorge Sacido Romero
• Localización: Sound effects: the object voice in fiction / coord. por Sylvia Mieszkowski; Jorge Sacido Romero (ed. lit.), 2015, ISBN 978-90-04-30438-3, págs. 185-214
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This essay reads three short stories by English authors from a psychoanalytical perspective to show that the usually underrated art of short fiction has made a relevant contribution to the literary treatment of the object voice in the twentieth century. Because voice qua object is defined by psychoanalysis as mute, the essay engages in a theoretical discussion to justify the choice of stories in which the object voice manifests itself in singing. In E.M. Forster's "The Story of the Siren" (1904; 1920), the song of the legendary sea creature is prophesied to bring about an apocalyptic transformation of the world. Singing in V.S. Pritchett's "The Voice" (1945) oscillates between salvation and damnation till it is eventually associated with bare life in the state of emergency of the London blitz. In Muriel Spark's "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (1957) - a postmodernist parable of human freedom - the obsessive echo of a whistled tune functions as a force of mortifying subjugation, as symbolic authority and perverse jouissance act in complicity. The analysis of the voice theme in these stories is not done in isolation, but set within the wider framework of their respective author's other work, his/her view of genre and poetics.