[Vwoolf] "Jacob's Room": crux #7

[Adolphe Haberer]

Dear Stuart,
I have no problem at all with the voice speaking in the passage you quote from Chapter XIII of Jacob's Room. For me that voice is simply an avatar, or vocal embodiment, of the omniscient narrator, which the Cambridge Dictionary online defines as "the ​voice in which a ​story is written that is ​outside the ​story and ​knows everything about the ​characters and ​events in the ​story". Why should it be attributed to anybody in particular, or as Andre Gerard suggests, to The Times?  For me that voice is to be taken at its faceless value.
Incidentally, I have been reading Any Human Body, that fictive diary of Logan Mountstuart which William Boyd published in 2002. In the course of his long eventful life (1906-1991) he meets lots of people, including Virginia Woolf at the Café Royal. Rather critical of her, I must say. But I find the book quite remarkable. 
With all best
Ado

====================
Adolphe Haberer
Professeur émérite à l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2
1 route de Saint-Antoine
69380 Chazay d'Azergues
33 (0)4 78 43 65 24
33 (0)6 63 57 95 91
adolphe.haberer at univ-lyon2.fr
ado at haberer.fr



Le 2 sept. 2015 à 15:16, Stuart N. Clarke <stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com> a écrit :

>  
> I think you’ll like this one!
>  
> ‘A voice kept remarking that Prime Ministers and Viceroys spoke in the Reichstag; entered Lahore; said that the Emperor travelled; in Milan they rioted; said there were rumours in Vienna; said that the Ambassador at Constantinople had audience with the Sultan; the fleet was at Gibraltar. The voice continued, imprinting on the faces of the clerks in Whitehall (Timothy Durrant was one of them) something of its own inexorable gravity, as they listened, deciphered, wrote down. Papers accumulated . . .
> ‘The voice spoke plainly in the square quiet room with heavy tables, where one elderly man made notes on the margin of type-written sheets, his silver-topped umbrella leaning against the bookcase. . . .
> ‘“The Kaiser,” the far-away voice remarked in Whitehall, “received me in audience.”’ (near end of ch. xiii)
>  
> What voice?  Sir Edward Grey’s? Asquith’s? The telephone? Harold Nicolson’s father’s? Morse code? Wireless telegraphy?  Or is it just messages pouring in?
>  
> Some metaphorical uses of “voice(s)” elsewhere in JR:
>  
> ‘The worn voices of clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long.’ (end of ch. viii)
>  
> ‘Yet even in this light the legends on the tombstones could be read, brief voices saying, “I am Bertha Ruck,” “I am Tom Gage.” . . . the tablet set up in 1780 to the Squire of the parish who relieved the poor, and believed in God—so the measured voice goes on down the marble scroll, as though it could impose itself upon time and the open air.’ (end of ch. xi)
> Stuart
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====================
Adolphe Haberer
Professeur émérite à l'Université Lumière-Lyon 2
1 route de Saint-Antoine
69380 Chazay d'Azergues
33 (0)4 78 43 65 24
33 (0)6 63 57 95 91
adolphe.haberer at univ-lyon2.fr
ado at haberer.fr