2What processes are involved when a reader feels personally addressed by a text? While identification with the characters is not necessary, there might still be a kind of projection (allowed by the work) onto one’s life and being, involving a questioning of one’s identity and modes of thinking, behaving and reacting – similar to the process of “refiguration” theorized by Paul Ricœur in Temps et récit: readers who originally feel de-familiarized by reading then freely invest the fictive world offered to them, thus extending their perceptive possibilities and creating meaning in their lives through a reorganized vision of the elements those lives are made of. Marielle Macé, in Façons de lire, manières d’être, comments that “to interpret the text is to understand oneself in front of the text” (Macé 2011, 127). This article contends that the reader may feel drawn into such a complex, dual process of simultaneous erasing of identity and identification through the “voice of the text,” the nature of which must now be defined.

4Much as the notion of voice in Husserl develops from a tension (according to Derrida), likewise tentative definitions of the voice of the text often build from sets of oppositions, between body and text or the spoken and the written, between the material and the abstract or again between meaning and sensations. Claire Fabre, in Effets de voix, has argued that voice results from a complex network of tensions (Fabre 1994, 130), thus highlighting the unstable, dynamic quality of the notion. Noëlle Batt, in the same volume, suggests that the voice of the text emerges from the combination of three phenomena: style, as a network of syntactical and semantical features also endowed with sonorous and rhythmic materiality; the voice effect, or the action of this style upon the reader who is thereby led to a poetic mode of listening; the meaning of the text and its resonance at other levels of the text, corresponding to linguistics, style, genre, topics and symbols, and being unearthed by the reader’s action of linking or relating (Batt 1994). The voice of the text thus dynamically emerges from the interaction between these three phenomena occurring in three distinct though interpenetrating fields. More recently, Peter Szendy again defined the voice arising from silent reading through a combination of three elements, which he calls “the minimal triangulation of reading” (Szendy 2022, 12, my translation). According to Szendy, silent reading, as an interiorized version of the form of reading out loud that used to prevail, always involves at least three parties: “as I read, I let a voice uttered for you go through me, even as it feels that you and me make one with this voice speaking in us and for us” (ibid.). Such a triangulation may open within readers the necessary space for them to be changed by their reading experience, as well as for meaning to emerge through an interpretive process that is necessarily subjective and influenced by the reading circumstances.

5For Batt, “the meaning of the text” (Batt 1994, 27) derives from the resonance of its topics and recurring formal patterns at various levels, all of which form what could be called the reader’s mental image of the text – an image made up of textual fragments merged with pictures that keeps shifting, even after they have put the book down, whenever a given phrase or word returns to the reader’s mind under the stimulus of their current experience. Such a fluid, fragmented image could be what readers have in mind when thinking of a book, hence the radical diversity of visions they may have of the same book, meaning something unique and different to each reader, and subject to change depending on the moment of reading in the readers’ lives. Arguably, in literature, fluctuating meaning partly derives from the equally fluctuating voice of the text, while communication – relying on more straightforward messages – would probably not allow for the emergence of a similar “voice.” Indeed, the voice of the text seems to partly spring from a singular use of language that includes idiosyncrasies and language deviations, a form of what Barthes called “writing aloud” (“l’écriture à voix haute”), a “language lined with flesh” (“le langage tapissé de peau”) which articulates body and language (Barthes 1973, 88-89, my translation). In the present reader’s experience at least, it is impossible to feel called – let alone caught – by a text in the absence of a remarkable quality in the rhythm, stress and syntax patterns of the illusory voice arising from that text.

10Delusion appears as one of the side-effects of being alone and may, in turn, contribute to the characters’ growing isolation. In “Former Marine,” Conrad is reduced to small talk with the waitress and the synthetic messages received from his hearing aids (ibid., 3). In “The Invisible Parrot,” Billy is engaged in conversation with his imaginary parrot perched on his shoulder. Ventana, who is isolated racially and economically, believes she has developed a relation of trust with the fierce watch dog when in fact the dog eventually lashes out at her and bites her. From these stories, a chorus of endurance and broken dreams may be heard: in “Christmas Party,” dreams of a baby lead a sterile couple to break up before the newly remarried wife adopts an African baby; in “The Green Door,” we encounter a desire for a life of performing as the aging, disillusioned bartender gazes at disco-star Cher’s chorus (ibid., 218). Despite the disappointments and pain brought about by life, the characters retain an interest in others and their stories, or discover said interest, as is the case for Howard in “Transplant:” after having resisted meeting the young widow of the donor whose heart saved his own life, he finds himself weeping as he draws her close to him and they remain motionless in each other’s embrace while she listens to his (and her dead husband’s) heart (ibid., 64).

11The stories stage many a situation in which a narrator listens to another’s story, often paying attention to the speaker’s “grain” of voice (to pick up Roland Barthes’s term), as is the case in “Searching for Veronica,” whose female secondary narrator is said to have “a nice whiskey-and-cigarette voice” (ibid., 189). Indeed, in Banks’s collection (as with most short stories, whose format allows little space to develop portrayal), characters are barely described physically but come to life mostly through their voice, both internal and external, their thoughts and spoken words. In “Searching for Veronica,” the primary narrator – revealingly called Russell – while listening to Dorothy’s story also acknowledges his interest in “the way she told it” (ibid., 189).

12Attention to others in dialogues develops not only through the explicit meaning of words (i.e. the communication function of language), but also through individual, fluctuating tones and rhythms (i.e. the phatic or performative function of language): in the collection, the link between speaker and listener relies on modest and discrete manifestations that are likely to suggest emotion while avoiding pathos, thanks to the distance introduced by an emphasis on the materiality of language.

13But how can these material qualities make up the phenomenon of “voice” in the text? How does “voice” differ from other stylistic features or from style in general, which, according to Noëlle Batt, is but one of the three aspects of voice? First, I would argue, through its oral dimension, or relation to the spoken (aloud or in one’s head), and its being related to and dependent on breath. Voice is thus vulnerable, but also malleable, and may go through a whole range of rhythms and sounds, tones, stress patterns and accents; secondly, one may argue that voice is perceptible in a text for its power to create relation – hence the reader’s sense of being addressed, concerned, as the text seems to “speak” to them. What is called upon in the reader does not so much have to do with interests and concerns as with less conscious motivations conveyed as if surreptitiously – at the very least, indirectly – or through suggestions – in keeping with what Barthes refers to as the “signifiance” (i.e. “significance”) mode – and emerging from reading as an intimate encounter: in some cases, when the “grain of voice” is perceived (Barthes 1982, 236-244), reading almost becomes an erotic relation, as readers verbalize the text and recreate it in their mind while the text comes to inhabit them. “Voice” thus seems to refer to a complex process involving several parties into a fluid, unpredictable interaction that continues long after the reader has put the book down. Along those lines, voice would then vary with each reading and pursue its variations in the reader’s memory.

14In Banks’s collection, readers may find themselves responding to the stories most intensely when encountering a number of language deviations or detours, all related to powerful emotions. Conrad’s complaining about his sons’ careless silence is conveyed through litotes: “I wouldn’t mind any kind of news, actually” (“Former Marine,” Banks 2013, 5). Likewise, in “The Outer Banks,” the female character’s emotion after the couple’s dog has been hastily buried in the sand shows in a perversion of speech amounting to closure: “She spoke slowly, as if to herself” (ibid., 170. The most blatant distortion appears in “The Green Door” through the disease of one of the regular patrons of the bar, creating an awkward comic effect:

Enrique folds his paper and says, ‘Back the fuck off, white bread, or I’ll cut your fucking nuts off.’ […] Enrique furrows his brow like he’s going to cry. He looks first at me, then at Allyn, and says, ‘Jesus Christ, I don’t know what made me say that. I’m really, really sorry, man. I got this disease, it’s like a kind of autism and makes me say shit I don’t want to say. I apologize, man.’ (ibid., 219)

15Is this a statement about the conventions of dialogue and the acknowledged need for decorum sometimes barring truer feelings? Or could the “disease” point towards the warping of discourse caused by the power and seduction relationship almost always involved in a dialogue? The collection abounds in examples of daily conversation that are similarly rife with clichés, or at least predictable turns of speech and ready-made phrases, which to some extent constitute claims of power. As a favor to the black woman who is kept waiting by the Chinese cashier, Billy in “The Invisible Parrot” blurts out: “Hey, Missus! You got payin’ customers here!” (ibid., 161). In “Big Dog,” Erik’s delivering the news of his having been awarded the McArthur is met with passionate, clichéed expressions of admiration that soon turn out to actually convey spite and envy. Much to Erik’s embarrassment, Ted begins: “If you don’t mind my saying, man, the truth is, you have a kind of forceful openness that attracts grace”; to which Erik retorts “That’s bullshit. I’m just lucky is all” (ibid., 108). Then Joan jumps in: “No, Ted’s right […] It’s what they call magnetism. Or charisma. You’re blessed with it, lovey.” Another of Erik’s falsely modest protests soon follows (“Come on, it’s a fucking lottery…”) before Raphael comments, in his typically sarcastic way, that “God, next you’ll be washing his feet” (ibid., 108). As the friendly party degenerates into a fight unearthing frustrations and jealousy, controlled, decorous language veers into an unbridled expression of desire, aided by unrestrained drinking. Throughout the collection, predictable language contrasts with a singular, individual discourse that offers its gold nuggets to the reader’s eyes and ears.

16Although Banks’s A Permanent Member of the Family belongs to the genre of realistic fiction, amply tapping the field of ordinary conversation, it offers many a striking phrase – as indeed ordinary conversation also does to an attentive listener (which Russell Banks definitely is). Banks carries out a specific work on clichés that, up to a certain point, is reminiscent of Carver’s. In Carver’s stories, according to Claire Fabre, ordinary conversations are represented rather than transformed, which may create a deviation effect for any reader expecting a mending or repairing action from fiction, aimed at intensifying meaning potentials or simply emphasizing effects (Fabre 1994). In the dialogues of A Permanent Member of the Family, stylistic elaboration remains unobtrusive, and silences are numerous, thus allowing words to reverberate and their material qualities to come out whether they are common, banal words or words endowed with the power of arousing uncommon images that bloom out and shift as in a kaleidoscope.

17“Snowbirds” is one of those remarkable images that give its title to one of the stories and reappears in “The Outer Banks.” The story is about a retired couple who decides to visit the places they have been dreaming of: “There were no children or grandchildren or other close family – they were free as birds. ‘Snowbirds,’ they’d been called in Florida and out in Arizona” (ibid., 167). Yet the freedom and lightness present in the image is tainted by the shadow of aging and a narrowing down of possibilities. Theirs is the ultimate freedom before being relieved of the weight of living, as discreetly hinted at by the unexpected lightness of the dog’s dead body: “He kneeled down and gently lifted the dog in his arms, surprised that she was not heavier” (ibid., 169). Associated as it is with death, lightness acquires connotations of vulnerability that twist the potentially joyful image of birds. This is all the truer for readers previously struck by the opening of the story entitled “Snowbirds,” where the beginning of George and Isabel’s vacation in Florida is marred with the former’s sudden death, which leaves his widow to explore alone a newly acquired “free[dom]:” “Then, barely a month into that first winter, at the end of his fourth tennis lesson at the Flamingo Park public courts, George dropped to his knees as if he’d won the final at Wimbledon and died of a heart attack” (ibid., 65). The kneeling posture, evocative of a supplicant and later echoed in “The Outer Banks,” here connects triumph with death.

18Many of the striking phrases that may stay with readers long after they have read the collection thus combine antagonistic connotations or qualities such as, for instance, beauty and pain: such is the case with the expression “sting your heart” – to be found twice in slightly different forms in the story “Lost and Found” after its first appearance in “Christmas Party” (ibid., 39) – which may have gone unnoticed the first time, until it is repeated in “Lost and Found.” This is how Ellen describes to Stanley her feeling of being “alone in the world” when they meet at a professional convention and almost have an affair: “‘Crowds can sting your heart when you’re alone in the world. Like me.’ He liked that phrase, ‘sting your heart.’ Not something Sharon would say” – Sharon is the wife to whom Stanley decides to remain faithful although he took Ellen to his bedroom (ibid., 178). Years later, when Ellen and Stanley meet again at a similar convention, the suppressed memory returns to him. He explains to her:

The truth is, I didn’t want to remember. […] I didn’t want to remember what I lost that night. And what I found. I wanted to forget that too.’
[…] he hears himself say, ‘My heart got stung. I could feel it beating, and for the first time in years, maybe in my whole life, I knew I was alive.’
‘And it scared you.’
‘It’s like, if you know you’re alive, you know you’re going to die.’ (ibid., 183-184)

19The power of the phrase is now made explicit, as is its association with life and death. Stanley has unconsciously assimilated it over the course of the years so that it comes back spontaneously, in a slightly different form. Such a phenomenon may be emblematic of the readers’ possible experience: because its originality is pointed out by Stanley and because it is repeated at the end of the story, the remarkable phrase with its stressed monosyllables is likely to remain in the readers’ memory, possibly to undergo a number of variations and resurface later in their thoughts or speech, thus enriching their vocabulary.

20The phenomenon occurs again more at length in “Searching for Veronica” when the narrator, Russell, finds himself increasingly uncomfortable with the story he has been listening to while waiting for his plane. Indeed, Dorothy is explaining how she had to get rid of Veronica, the young junkie whom she took under her protection and hired as her baby-sitter, and for whom she has been searching ever since:

That’s the way it goes down with junkies. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. They make up and shape reality with their jones, and if you buy even a small part of it, your own reality gets infected by it; until their jones is yours too, and all the time twenty-four-seven you’re thinking about whether she’s high or not, telling the truth or not, or if she even knows the truth. It’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. The only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them, don’t listen to word one of their elaborate explanations for their actions or inactions. Assume everything is a lie and just throw them out of the house. Even if it’s your own kid. Which is what I did.’
‘You mean Helen?’ I asked her.
“No, Veronica!” (ibid., 200-201)

21Eventually Russell blurts out:

‘You’re not looking for Veronica or Helene,’ I said. ‘You’re looking for someone else, someone the three of you did a very bad thing to. Someone whose name you haven’t revealed yet. And that’s what you’ve been trying to tell me tonight. And trying not to tell me.’
‘I’m only telling you what I know, Russell.’
‘That’s why you scare me. It’s like you said about Veronica and junkies like her. They live in their own private story, even when they’re not high. You said it’s like a virus. Their sickness becomes your sickness. You said the only safe response is to quarantine yourself off from them. You said to assume everything is a lie. And that’s exactly what I’m doing now. Good night,’ I said, ‘whoever you are. Wherever you are. Whatever you’ve done.’ (ibid., 206)

22While trying to escape the contagious confusion of identities that has been growing between story-teller Dorothy, the junkie Veronica and Dorothy’s daughter Helene, the narrator Russell also realizes that the woman in whom he has been increasingly feeling interested may be a murderer. In a comic metafictional twist, Russell acknowledges the contaminating power of words as well as their potential destabilizing effects upon one’s sense of identity by quoting Dorothy’s words verbatim and, in yet another twist, by following Dorothy’s advice – “Assume everything is a lie” (ibid., 200-201) – or at least, tyring to do so, as the memory of the story is bound to haunt the listener.

23This infectious power of words may actually account for a number of deliberately maintained ambiguities or uncertainties within the collection. At the end of “The Outer Banks,” as the couple tries to look ahead and plan more visits, they come up with a blurred picture only imperfectly covering the certainty of coming death:

Ed said, ‘We could keep going, y’know. Head for Cape Canaveral, check out the Space Center and all.’
She said, ‘They shut the space program down, I thought.’
‘I guess maybe they did.’ (ibid., 171)

24Indeed “The Outer Bank” symbolizes the ultimate limit – an idea that may also be read in the very title of the collection, a posteriori, once the reader has grown familiar with the stories: how can one be a “permanent” member of the family unless, of course, one is a dead member? In the face of their common, sobering knowledge of their own mortality, the characters still try to go on living, or to “continu[e] to wait,” as is said of Betty, the nurse who drove reluctant Howard to meet the young widow of his heart’s donor; after having waited for a while, convinced that the meeting was to be brief, Betty got back into the car and, as the end of the story puts it, “continued to wait” (ibid., 64). Characters each in their own ways struggle to cope with the hardships of life and receive hope and comfort from moments of tenderness.

25Tenderness is visible in the already mentioned gesture of carrying a being in one’s arms, as in “The Outer Banks,” where it conveys all the solemnity of the dog’s death and burial and function as a harbinger of its owners’ deaths. As a recurring posture, embracing points at least towards two other stories: “Christmas Party,” in which Harold grabs his ex-wife’s adopted baby and makes for the door, and “Transplant,” which ends on a lasting embrace between Howard and the donor’s young widow (ibid., 64). Together these make up a tableau of endurance, a tribute to life as against the death statuary evoked by the dead dog seemingly “carved of wood” in “The Outer Banks” (ibid., 169). Two major elements in the world of Banks’s collection are combined here: tears and listening, or the expression of life’s sadness along with its antidote, or at least the possibility offered to any human being of registering such sadness to then try to use it as material in one’s own life and transform it.

26In A Permanent Member of the Family, tears appear in particularly intense scenes, as in “The Outer Banks” when the couple discusses what to do with the dead dog and Ed turns to find that Alice is crying: “He looked at his wife, as if for a solution. She was crying, though. Silently, with tears streaming down her pale cheeks, she cried steadily, as if she had been crying for a long time and had no idea how to stop” (ibid., 168). The long alliterative sentence, with its repeated consonants “s,” “t” and “r,” seems to convey a form of primitive outburst or cry, a growing, endless flow once released. Then Alice asks:

‘But what are we going to do?’
‘About what?’
‘Oh, Ed. About Rosie. This,’ she said and waved a hand at the rain and the sea. ‘Everything.’ (ibid.)

27The fact that “This” is immediately followed by “Everything” in Alice’s speech brings together the categories of the determined (“This,” whose reference is not, however, made explicit) and the absolute (represented by “Everything”); except that, for the reader’s benefit, the pronouns are separated by the evocation of her hand’s motion (“and waved a hand at the rain and the sea”), conveying a sense of her expanding despair over both space and time – and the time needed to read the words between “This” and “Everything.” The impact of Alice’s words does not come so much from their meaning as from their rhythm and the tone that may be imagined to them – exasperation and concern, springing from her sudden awareness of the gravity of the moment and the value of life. Again, “significance” is at work here (rather than signification) through Alice’s way of addressing her interlocutor for the sake of catching his attention without saying anything specific. When she asks “But what are we going to do?,” does she mean about “[t]his” or about “[e]verything”? Or is she asking how we, as human beings, ceaselessly make up new ways of coping with adversity and the outrageous fact of our finitude, how we “beat on, boats against the current” (Fitzgerald 1926, 172)? In other words, how can literature help?

28Scenes of embrace and tears in Banks’s collection seem to encapsulate both the sadness of life and its joys, a whole range of emotions in their vibrant intensity. As emblems of endurance, they may bring to mind Toni Morrison’s evocation of the slaves’ songs in Beloved:

They sang it out and beat it up […] They sang the women they knew; the children they had been; the animal they had tamed themselves or seen others tame. They sang of bosses and masters and misses; of mules and dogs and the shamelessness of life. They sang lovingly of graveyards and sisters long gone. Of pork in the woods; meal in the pan; fish on the line; cane, rain and rocking chairs.
And they beat. The women for having known them and no more, no more; the children for having been them but never again […] Tasting hot mealcake among pine trees, they beat it away. Singing love songs to Mr. Death, they smashed his head. (Morrison 2005, 128)

30Phrases such as those already mentioned – “sting your heart,” “free as birds,” “that and the way she told it,” “I guess maybe they did,” “She was crying, though,” “It’s like, if you know you’re alive, you know you’re going to die,” or again “Assume everything is a lie” and “This. […] Everything” – these are but a few of the word combinations that make it possible for the collection to go on living in the reader, giving rise to a variety of intense sensations and feelings, broadening the range of their perceptive possibilities as well as their vocabulary of emotions and ideas, to become an integral part of the music of their lives.