Narrative in the Icelandic Family Saga by Heather O'Donoghue

Author:Heather O'Donoghue [O'Donoghue, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Medieval, Maritime History & Piracy, Literary Criticism, European, German, Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology
ISBN: 9781350211636
Google: lUFBEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2022-08-25T22:32:24+00:00

4

The voice of the silent narrator

Paul Ricœur describes the narrative voice as ‘the silent speech that presents the world of the text to the reader’.1 This definition of course belongs to the world of reader and written text; if we are thinking of an original context of oral delivery, with an audible narrative voice, and an audience physically present at a recital, rather than an individual reader, silent speech is very much not the issue. And in a performed recitation of a saga, the narrator’s voice is embodied in an actual person speaking. But what might be the relationship between that actual speaker and the written text which has come down to us? We surely cannot imagine that the saga text is a verbatim record of an actual recitation, although perhaps we could envisage a creative author dictating to a scribe.2 Might the saga author have deliberately produced a text which actual performers could recite as if in their own words – that is, a text styled to be narrated aloud? Or might a long-standing tradition of orally performed sagas, or, more likely, shorter saga episodes, have influenced the style of a literate author? There is no obvious answer to the questions these issues raise. But whatever the circumstances of a saga’s composition or recitation, what we now have to deal with is a written text, and Ricœur’s formulation is a valuable starting point, especially given the particular character of the family sagas’ ‘silent speech’ – that is, a discourse which is not only silent by being written rather than spoken, but also with the narrator’s individuality effaced – a silent narrative voice, but also a silent narrator.

Family saga narrators are always heterodiegetic – that is, they are not themselves part of the storyworld, which is set long before their own time.3 Moreover, narrators very rarely engage directly with their readers or listeners from their situation above and beyond the diegesis to comment on it. Family saga narrators are often described as simply recording what happened (or what might have happened), objectively and without interventions which might give them individuality or personality.4 We are very far from narrators invented by authors either as authorial alter egos, or as characters in their own right, whose personal and sometimes idiosyncratic attitude towards the events and characters in the storyworld is part of the whole narrative experience. The narrative voice in family sagas is largely effaced in terms of expressing a distinctive moral standpoint, or adopting an individual stylistic mode.5 In general, saga author and saga narrator are fused as producers of the text, the equivalent of what Wayne C. Booth termed the ‘implied author’ who is the ‘organizing principle of the text’ as distinct from the biographical, or flesh and blood author of the text.6 And on the rare occasions when a narrator’s voice seems to be heard passing extra-diegetic comment on the substance of the text, especially when the intervention is in the form of a brief subjective reaction to the narrative, there is another text producer to be taken into consideration: the scribe.

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