"Ventriloquism in Postmodern Literature: Questioning the Perception of Agency" by Sasha Marx
“In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise” (Auster 12).
City of Glass is a work of metaliterature by Paul Auster that centers around a detective fiction writer, Quinn, who becomes suddenly entangled in a strange case when a he picks up a mistaken phone call asking for a detective and decides to play the part. City of Glass tests reader’s preconceived notions of reality, narrative, and genre through its form. The novel uses a ventriloquial framework to set up triads of relationships that call into question the notions of power, selfhood, and agency, leading to larger questions of relationality within a given world in postmodern literature. Because of the way it distorts one’s perception of agency within a given reality and questions who has the power to make things happen in a narrative, ventriloquism can be used as a lens through which to examine the postmodern literary techniques that address the ontological nuances of the genre.
History of Ventriloquism
Ventriloquism, or the art of “throwing the voice,” is a form that dates back to at least 16th century France, but also has antecedents in ancient Egyptian and Hebrew archaeology (Ventriloquism [Encyclopedia Britannica]). The art of ventriloquism involves two main elements, the first being a throwing of the voice in a way that creates the illusion of the sound coming from a source separate from the actual speaker. Typically, there is also a component of concealment or disguise that heightens the effect of the illusion. The actual word “ventriloquism” comes from the Latin roots venter and loqui, which translate literally to “belly-speaking” (Ventriloquism: What and Why). This is due to the older belief that the stomach was used in the style of speech needed to perform the throwing of the voice, but since, the understanding of ventriloquistic style has changed. It is now known that the art of throwing the voice has much to do with the breathwork behind the speech, in which the sound of the voice is diffused or spread by a pressure placed on the vocal cords through breath that is “allowed to escape slowly, the tones being muffled by narrowing the glottis and the mouth being opened as little as possible, while the tongue is retracted and only its tip moves” (Ventriloquism [Encyclopedia Britannica]).
The second element of the illusion of ventriloquism is the presence of a dummy, which is positioned to appear as the owner of the voice that is being thrown by the ventriloquist. In effect the ventriloquist becomes one who “presumes to speak on behalf of some voiceless group or individual” (Goldstein 179). The ventriloquist additionally manipulates the dummy into playing the “lead role” between the two, furthering the illusion by making the dummy appear to have independence and a “mind of its own.” This is done through arguments or banter between the ventriloquist and dummy (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]). This plays with the distribution of power between the ventriloquist and dummy.
The combination of the thrown voice, usage of the dummy, and illusion of independence of the dummy creates the deceptive image that the dummy has its own mind, when in reality, the dummy is entirely under the vocal and manipulative control of the ventriloquist. Oftentimes, the illusion is so powerful that the audience becomes somewhat entranced, even with the knowledge that the situation is fully under the control of the ventriloquist.
One of the reasons ventriloquism was, and remains to be, such an intriguing and eerie art form is its tendency to “blur the lines between anthropomorphic objects and their human partners” (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]). The illusion that is created is “both visual and vocal, and both spatial and temporal” because of the way the voice is somehow not tied completely to either the ventriloquist or the dummy, creating a sense of alterity (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]).
In historical contexts, ventriloquism took its earliest forms in mysticism. One of the first examples of ventriloquism is the Delphic oracles of ancient Greek culture, in which the voice of God delivered a prophecy through the body of a figure of nobility, the illusion being that God’s voice seemed to be coming from the priest, priestess, etc. Another example of early ventriloquism in the Medieval period is witchcraft and possession; a human would be reported to have been demonically possessed and uttered demonic speech in which the origin of the voice was unclear but not his or her own. Around the turn of the 19th century, however, ventriloquism became an art form on stage in Europe, then the United States, used mostly in magic shows and vaudeville theaters. Later on, it started being associated with children’s shows and horror films (Ventriloquism: What and Why?).
With the rise of media forms like film and music, a new understanding of ventriloquism was formed. Especially in relation to cinema, ventriloquism can be seen as a conceptualization of the way that “sound and image are essentially different phenomena in film,” with the ventriloquist being the sound engineer behind the film. Similarly, recorded music illustrates another form of ventriloquism in the machine’s ability to capture the human voice and essentially re-use it in another context (on the radio, through music applications, etc.), where the listener is consuming the voice without it actually coming directly from the source it originated from (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]).
Ventriloquism in Postmodern Literature
The overall goal of a ventriloquist’s illusion, in essence, is to confuse the audience and make them question what they know to be true and question who is actually controlling the situation or narrative. Postmodern techniques in literature share some similar goals in terms of effect on the reader/audience. In Ursula Heise’s chapter of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, “Postmodern Novels,” she quotes Hans Bertens in saying that postmodern literature all commonly addresses “‘a crisis of representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense...the representations we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted’” (Cassuto and Heise 965). Generally speaking, postmodern literature aims to address the ontological questions of being within a world, often using more specific techniques such as antirealism to make the reader question their perception of reality as it relates to both that work of literature and their personal being.
Heise explains how modernist literature, as a baseline, “seeks to explore the real through its varied perceptions, memories, anticipations, and translations into story by a variety of characters” (Cassuto and Heise 968). This allows readers to think about and reflect upon reality while keeping the facts of reality intact and relying upon the notion that everyone experiences the same “basic reality” (Cassuto and Heise 969). However, postmodern literature fractures the sense of shared reality by disregarding and subverting conventional constructions of reason and structure within a narrative. The effect of this upon the reader is that it requires them to “consider what constitutes the reality or plausibility of a narrative universe, how textual worlds are made and unmade, and by extension, how we construe the reality of the extratextual world” (Cassuto and Heise 969). At its core, postmodern literature is a question of coherence and reality.
Having similar effects on their respective audiences, one can begin to understand how ventriloquism takes its shape as a structural lens through which to view postmodern techniques in literature. Ventriloquism manipulates the audience; postmodern literature manipulates the expectations created by traditional genres, and by association, manipulates the audience. To explore how ventriloquism mirrors postmodern techniques, one can look at a few different things, including authorial versus character agency, narration styles, and characterization structures within a work of postmodern literature. In this case, Paul Auster’s metafictional detective novel, City of Glass, provides plentiful examples of ventriloquist techniques.
Ventriloquism in Characterization
One way to use the triadic ventriloquist setup as a lens through which to consider the effects of postmodern literary techniques is by examining the characters within the actual fiction and their relationships to one another. In some cases, this can provide a framework for understanding the nuances of control, power, voice, and action within a person and within the relationships between people.
In City of Glass, the author actually sets up one of these ventriloquist metaphors for the reader. The protagonist, Quinn, is a writer of novels, and he uses a pen name: William Wilson. Quinn’s novels are mostly detective fiction and feature a protagonist named Max Work, who appears throughout all of his novels as the main character. The relationship between Quinn, William Wilson, and Max Work, as described by Auster, mimics the ventriloquist dynamic: "In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. If Wilson was an illusion, he nevertheless justified the lives of the other two. If Wilson did not exist, he nevertheless was the bridge that allowed Quinn to pass from himself into Work" (Auster 12).
Wilson, Max Work, and Quinn are in essence all the same being, in that Work and Wilson do not technically exist. However, an entire fictional world is created due to Quinn’s split between himself, Work, and Wilson. Wilson is described as the “bridge that allows Quinn to pass from himself into Work,” emulating the function of the ventriloquist in an illusion. The ventriloquist links the dummy and voice, which are separate and unrelated entities on their own, therefore playing an indispensable role in creating the illusion; likewise, the identity of Wilson is indispensable in creating the illusion of the fictional reality within the detective novels. Thus, Wilson as the ventriloquist is also responsible for creating the voice-- Max Work. Just as the ventriloquist throws his or her own voice and essentially makes the voice appear as though it is its own entity, Wilson creates Max Work as his own identity. Finally, a ventriloquist typically assigns or syncs the voice to the dummy, completing the connection between the three of them and, as a result, giving an element of illusioned control to the dummy. In City of Glass, Quinn’s identity of Wilson creates Max Work, giving Quinn (the dummy) a voice in the apparatus. This can be interpreted as a conflict of subjectivity, in which Quinn did not feel like he otherwise had a sense of control or voice in his own life, relying upon his own ventriloquist and voice (Wilson and Work) within him to “assign” him that control.
This raises the ontological, postmodern question: what are the rules within the world one inhabits, and what can one do within that world? In the context of traditional, modern notions of reality in fictional worlds, one might assume that Quinn is or should be in control of Work and Wilson, since Work and Wilson are both “alter-ego”-type identities that exist within Quinn. However, describing the relationship and power dynamics between his three selves in the ventriloquist framework with Wilson defined specifically as the ventriloquist effectively shifts the readers entire perception of Quinn’s selves and who controls whom. This, subsequently, forces the reader to question who has the power to make things happen in a story. Is it the ventriloquist, who at the end of the day, illusion aside, is the one physically controlling the voice and the dummy? But defining Wilson as the ventriloquist even though he is simply a fictional identity of Quinn’s and doesn't actually exist (within Auster’s fictional world) suggests that the things that control us and our narratives are sometimes internal forces that are created within our own selves, rather than external forces. This, then, raises the question of what drives us to take certain action within our worlds (thus, what are we doing within our worlds and why?). Defining Quinn’s own identities in a ventriloquist framework with Wilson as the ventriloquist essentially forces the ontological questions of being upon the reader, thus making ventriloquism an effective lens to understand how postmodern literature aims to dislocate one’s perception about their own function and agency within life.
Auster (the author) further breaks down the nuances of power dynamics and manipulation by creating another triad; this time, however, the triad exists within the context of the actual plot of City of Glass. The relationship now is between Quinn, his identity as Paul Auster the detective (from here on referred to as “Paul”), and Peter Stillman, Jr. In this example, the ventriloquism metaphor is not explicitly stated but rather left for the reader to interpret. Peter is the mentally incapacitated man who mistakenly but repeatedly calls Quinn in the middle of the night asking for Paul Auster, the detective (Auster 13). Quinn eventually accepts the false identity of Paul and becomes entangled within the case of Peter Stillman, in which he and his wife/caretaker, Virginia, need a detective to keep watch on Peter’s recently-released-from-prison father, Stillman Sr., believing him to be out to get Peter. Thus, Paul (his legitimate identity as a character unknown for most of the story) becomes another alter-ego or identity of Quinn’s as he takes on Paul’s role, which was essentially handed to him by Peter via the phone call, and becomes involved in the case.
In reading into the ventriloquial nature of this triad, Quinn once again is placed at the center of the relationship as the lifeless dummy. Similar to the first metaphor, his alternate identity takes on the role of the voice, which is assigned to Quinn/the dummy by the ventriloquist orchestrating the entire apparatus: Peter. By placing those phone calls to Quinn, even if it was a mistaken number, Peter essentially “threw” out the voice of Paul to inhabit Quinn, completing the triad and acting as the link between Quinn and Paul (dummy and voice).
This once again has several implications about narrative control within a given world. Once again, assigning the voice of an alternate identity to Quinn gives him an element of control in his own life by giving him the opportunity to embark upon this case and move his own story in that direction. Inadvertently, Peter-- who seemingly has the overarching power in their dynamic and “creates” or offers up the voice of Paul-- gives control to an otherwise lifeless and stagnant Quinn the same way a ventriloquist uses his position of power to give an illusioned control to his dummy by providing it with a voice. The key word, however, is “illusioned” control: it may appear that Quinn is in control of his actions in the way that he goes about tracking Stillman Sr. and working on the case, but at the end of the day, Peter is the one orchestrating it behind the scenes-- thus, the control Quinn experiences is an illusion. This becomes evident to the reader later on in City of Glass, when Quinn becomes so heavily invested in the role delegated to him by Peter that he becomes progressively more unhinged, eventually choosing to live as a homeless man camped out by Peter’s building. The illusion is that Peter gives control to Quinn, allowing Quinn to seemingly make choices regarding how he will process at each point in the case. Quinn’s eventual unhinged-ness, however, serves as a reminder that he was actually an out-of-control “dummy” all along, moving through his given world driven by the manipulation by Peter, whether or not he knew it.
Again, this ventriloquial framing of a relationship between a person and their own identity raises questions of the power of free will to allow one to act a certain way or choose a certain path within their given situation. It forces the reader to question their perception of control and manipulation by asking who really has the power to control the narrative.
Agency
Beyond the concrete examples of ventriloquial relationships between characters, one can extend this understanding of ventriloquism to apply more broadly to the forms and techniques of metafiction. Agency is broadly defined as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power (Merriam-Webster). Within literature, this can be interpreted as a character’s ability to act or live freely within a defined world, or an author’s ability to make choices and exert control over the world or characters. Postmodern literary techniques often play with the notions of agency, and this is something that can be examined through the model of ventriloquism. When it comes to a ventriloquist and his dummy forming an illusion with a thrown voice, the illusion serves to question who is controlling the narrative, and by extension, who has the power?
Because the ventriloquist is behind the voice, is he or she controlling what happens? At the same time, the nature of the ventriloquist relationship and the illusion suggests that the dummy is in control of the narrative, with the words that appear to be coming from its mouth and the actions that appear to be independent of the ventriloquist-- thus the audience is meant to believe that the dummy is controlling the narrative by arguing with the ventriloquist or something to that effect. But still, at the root of it all is the ventriloquist quietly controlling the situation.
Within a piece of fiction, the reader makes the assumption that the author has written a novel with a narrator who is either omniscient or a character within the defined world. The idea of the author then becomes detached from the story and the world. Thus, when reading a piece of fiction, the characters have agency within their world, and this is the entire structure of modernist, traditional literature, at least within the genre of fiction. However, in postmodern metafiction, this assumption is often subverted. This can be done in many ways, but a particularly stark example can be found in City of Glass. There are several instances where the author, Paul Auster, inserts himself into the novel in various ways. Sometimes, the tone of the narration shifts and the reader gets the feeling that they are being spoken to directly, and they are suddenly privy to information that the characters are not. For example, when the narrator makes references to Quinn’s (the main character) dreams: “In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a pile of rubbish” (Auster 113). Though subtle, there is a hint of an audience change--almost an aside to the reader-- as the narrator is telling the reader something that even the main character, Quinn, is not privy to-- as it is a dream which he had no recollection of. In essence, the narrator switches from standard indirect speech to free indirect speech, suggesting that the narrator can or has switched viewpoints and is not necessarily contained to just Quinn’s character.
This makes the reader also remember that the author is there-- almost like a reminder that this world is created by the author. This goes against traditional genre conventions in which the reader simply enters the world when they begin to read and it exists separately from the author.
In the narrative world, “the right to speech invariably conveys narrational power” (Altman 68). In City of Glass, Paul Auster uses techniques that essentially give himself the right to speech within the fictional world, whereas in traditional genre conventions, the author (though he or she creates the world) does not have a voice or right to speech within the world-- the agency is with the characters. This relationship between power, speech, and agency in metafiction echoes some of the power dynamics of a ventriloquial illusion: The ventriloquist, as the agent, gives the dummy the right to speech, effectively giving the dummy a kind of narrational power within the illusion and shifting the agency to the dummy.
Unreliable Narration
Another way in which the ventriloquist model and relationship sets up a lens through which to understand postmodern literary techniques is by echoing the idea of unreliable narration. When considering the dynamic of a ventriloquist's illusion, as stated previously, the audience is meant to be confused by the thrown voice. Although the voice is being manipulated and created by the ventriloquist, the throwing of the voice causes it to appear and sound as though it is coming from somewhere else in the room. When a ventriloquist uses a dummy, the voice and dummy are manipulated in a way that makes it appear as though the dummy is the owner of the voice and thus the “narrator,” or one who is in control of the narrative/dialogue between the ventriloquist and dummy (Goldblatt 391). In effect, the entire illusion of ventriloquism is a form of unreliable narration.
Similarly, in the 1970’s and 1980’s--City of Glass was written in 1987—"postmodernism was most centrally associated with an extremely self-referential and often openly anti-realist type of narrative…[involving]...narrators whose identities remain ambiguous” (Cassuto and Heise 966). This serves to undermine the sense of a shared reality and reality in general, contributing to the antirealist themes in postmodernism. City of Glass offers an interesting example of unreliable narration. It is important to note that this exploration of narration differs from the analysis of agency because in the context of agency, the author’s narration is more so about his relation to the characters and who he chooses to give power to in the narrative, while in the context of unreliable narration, the discussion focuses more on the author’s relationship to the story itself.
Throughout the novel, it is unclear to the reader whether the narrator is Paul Auster himself (the author), some omniscient storyteller, or someone else, and what relation the narrator has to the story. The first major instance where there is a clear separation between the narrator and the story is on page 173; chapter 12 opens with, “A long time passed...the account of this period is less full than the author would have liked. But information is scarce, and he has preferred to pass over in silence what could not be definitely confirmed” (Auster 173).
In this instance, readers experience the jarring extrication of the narrator from the story-- if the narrator didn’t know what happened, then who would? Additionally, the way the narrator refers to the author as “the author” by speaking in the third person disjoints the narrative as well. Typically, the assumption is made that an author is narrating the story if it is in the third person. But here, the reader begins to wonder about the true identity of the narrator and whether it bears significance upon the story.
Quinn’s story supposedly ends early, and the remainder of the novel shifts to focus on the narrator. Here, the reader discovers that the narrator is seemingly a friend of Paul Auster (the character within the novel). Through character-Auster, the friend found Quinn’s red notebook and it becomes clear that the entire novel was written based on his interpretation of the contents of Quinn’s notebook. At this point, the story itself becomes unreliable because it is simply a reiteration of Quinn’s notes into a narrative format. This friend of character-Auster’s who found the notebook only wrote the story based on what Quinn wrote, and this both fictionalizes the narrator and also adds another layer of subjectivity to the story.
Additionally, Quinn’s mental state was clearly declining as he became invested in the case and took it to the point of living as a homeless man outside Peter and Virginia Stillmans’ building for months. If the narrative is simply based upon the notes Quinn wrote in a questionable mental state, the reader is forced to question the reliability of it. Traditionally, a narrator is either omniscient, the author themself, or first-person/the main character. However, in City of Glass, the narrator is revealed at the end to be a character within the story who isn’t actually a part of the story at all. As soon as the narrator hints at their identity and the perception of the story changes, what the reader “knows” to be true within the fictional world of the story is questioned.
The use of Auster as a character also introduces the question of how deeply that character is based off of Paul Auster, the author. If he is not based upon the author, then character-Auster and his friend, the narrator, are completely fictitious, and in a very obscure position to narrate the story, rendering the story quite fragile. On the other hand, if character-Auster is based on author-Auster, his narrator friend may also be based off of a real-life friend. This suggests, then, that some elements of the story may be true to life. This metafictional novel takes an antirealist approach by using an unreliable narration to alter the readers’ perception and sense of reality. To bring this into the context of ventriloquism, and finally knowing the identity of the narrator, one can approach the narration of City of Glass with a ventriloquist frame: the ventriloquist being Paul Auster, the author; the voice being the narrator (the friend of Paul Auster the character); and the dummy being Quinn, because the reader’s perception of Quinn is formed by the narrator’s voice, which is ultimately manipulated by Paul Auster (author). The overall effect is a somewhat muddled reality and an illusion of alterity similar to the one created by an actual act of ventriloquism.
The relationship between a ventriloquist, a dummy, and a thrown voice sets up an illusion that plays with power dynamics and blurs the source of control. In City of Glass in particular, the ventriloquial framework can be applied in many different ways in order to analyze and understand the nuances of postmodern questions of agency within one’s world. Auster (the author) sets up multiple different identity triads that take on a ventriloquial relationship, examples being Quinn/Max Work/William Wilson and Quinn/Paul Auster (detective)/Peter Stillman. Examining the ventriloquial nature of those relationships reveals an effort to fracture the sense of a shared reality and make the reader question what it means to have agency. Beyond the specific textual examples, the overall goal of a ventriloquial illusion is to make the audience question their own perception of who has narrative control in the apparatus; likewise, many postmodern literary techniques address similar goals, often raising the question of what one’s relation is to their world and what they can do within it.
City of Glass is a work of metaliterature by Paul Auster that centers around a detective fiction writer, Quinn, who becomes suddenly entangled in a strange case when a he picks up a mistaken phone call asking for a detective and decides to play the part. City of Glass tests reader’s preconceived notions of reality, narrative, and genre through its form. The novel uses a ventriloquial framework to set up triads of relationships that call into question the notions of power, selfhood, and agency, leading to larger questions of relationality within a given world in postmodern literature. Because of the way it distorts one’s perception of agency within a given reality and questions who has the power to make things happen in a narrative, ventriloquism can be used as a lens through which to examine the postmodern literary techniques that address the ontological nuances of the genre.
History of Ventriloquism
Ventriloquism, or the art of “throwing the voice,” is a form that dates back to at least 16th century France, but also has antecedents in ancient Egyptian and Hebrew archaeology (Ventriloquism [Encyclopedia Britannica]). The art of ventriloquism involves two main elements, the first being a throwing of the voice in a way that creates the illusion of the sound coming from a source separate from the actual speaker. Typically, there is also a component of concealment or disguise that heightens the effect of the illusion. The actual word “ventriloquism” comes from the Latin roots venter and loqui, which translate literally to “belly-speaking” (Ventriloquism: What and Why). This is due to the older belief that the stomach was used in the style of speech needed to perform the throwing of the voice, but since, the understanding of ventriloquistic style has changed. It is now known that the art of throwing the voice has much to do with the breathwork behind the speech, in which the sound of the voice is diffused or spread by a pressure placed on the vocal cords through breath that is “allowed to escape slowly, the tones being muffled by narrowing the glottis and the mouth being opened as little as possible, while the tongue is retracted and only its tip moves” (Ventriloquism [Encyclopedia Britannica]).
The second element of the illusion of ventriloquism is the presence of a dummy, which is positioned to appear as the owner of the voice that is being thrown by the ventriloquist. In effect the ventriloquist becomes one who “presumes to speak on behalf of some voiceless group or individual” (Goldstein 179). The ventriloquist additionally manipulates the dummy into playing the “lead role” between the two, furthering the illusion by making the dummy appear to have independence and a “mind of its own.” This is done through arguments or banter between the ventriloquist and dummy (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]). This plays with the distribution of power between the ventriloquist and dummy.
The combination of the thrown voice, usage of the dummy, and illusion of independence of the dummy creates the deceptive image that the dummy has its own mind, when in reality, the dummy is entirely under the vocal and manipulative control of the ventriloquist. Oftentimes, the illusion is so powerful that the audience becomes somewhat entranced, even with the knowledge that the situation is fully under the control of the ventriloquist.
One of the reasons ventriloquism was, and remains to be, such an intriguing and eerie art form is its tendency to “blur the lines between anthropomorphic objects and their human partners” (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]). The illusion that is created is “both visual and vocal, and both spatial and temporal” because of the way the voice is somehow not tied completely to either the ventriloquist or the dummy, creating a sense of alterity (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]).
In historical contexts, ventriloquism took its earliest forms in mysticism. One of the first examples of ventriloquism is the Delphic oracles of ancient Greek culture, in which the voice of God delivered a prophecy through the body of a figure of nobility, the illusion being that God’s voice seemed to be coming from the priest, priestess, etc. Another example of early ventriloquism in the Medieval period is witchcraft and possession; a human would be reported to have been demonically possessed and uttered demonic speech in which the origin of the voice was unclear but not his or her own. Around the turn of the 19th century, however, ventriloquism became an art form on stage in Europe, then the United States, used mostly in magic shows and vaudeville theaters. Later on, it started being associated with children’s shows and horror films (Ventriloquism: What and Why?).
With the rise of media forms like film and music, a new understanding of ventriloquism was formed. Especially in relation to cinema, ventriloquism can be seen as a conceptualization of the way that “sound and image are essentially different phenomena in film,” with the ventriloquist being the sound engineer behind the film. Similarly, recorded music illustrates another form of ventriloquism in the machine’s ability to capture the human voice and essentially re-use it in another context (on the radio, through music applications, etc.), where the listener is consuming the voice without it actually coming directly from the source it originated from (Ventriloquism [The Chicago School of Media Theory]).
Ventriloquism in Postmodern Literature
The overall goal of a ventriloquist’s illusion, in essence, is to confuse the audience and make them question what they know to be true and question who is actually controlling the situation or narrative. Postmodern techniques in literature share some similar goals in terms of effect on the reader/audience. In Ursula Heise’s chapter of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, “Postmodern Novels,” she quotes Hans Bertens in saying that postmodern literature all commonly addresses “‘a crisis of representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense...the representations we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted’” (Cassuto and Heise 965). Generally speaking, postmodern literature aims to address the ontological questions of being within a world, often using more specific techniques such as antirealism to make the reader question their perception of reality as it relates to both that work of literature and their personal being.
Heise explains how modernist literature, as a baseline, “seeks to explore the real through its varied perceptions, memories, anticipations, and translations into story by a variety of characters” (Cassuto and Heise 968). This allows readers to think about and reflect upon reality while keeping the facts of reality intact and relying upon the notion that everyone experiences the same “basic reality” (Cassuto and Heise 969). However, postmodern literature fractures the sense of shared reality by disregarding and subverting conventional constructions of reason and structure within a narrative. The effect of this upon the reader is that it requires them to “consider what constitutes the reality or plausibility of a narrative universe, how textual worlds are made and unmade, and by extension, how we construe the reality of the extratextual world” (Cassuto and Heise 969). At its core, postmodern literature is a question of coherence and reality.
Having similar effects on their respective audiences, one can begin to understand how ventriloquism takes its shape as a structural lens through which to view postmodern techniques in literature. Ventriloquism manipulates the audience; postmodern literature manipulates the expectations created by traditional genres, and by association, manipulates the audience. To explore how ventriloquism mirrors postmodern techniques, one can look at a few different things, including authorial versus character agency, narration styles, and characterization structures within a work of postmodern literature. In this case, Paul Auster’s metafictional detective novel, City of Glass, provides plentiful examples of ventriloquist techniques.
Ventriloquism in Characterization
One way to use the triadic ventriloquist setup as a lens through which to consider the effects of postmodern literary techniques is by examining the characters within the actual fiction and their relationships to one another. In some cases, this can provide a framework for understanding the nuances of control, power, voice, and action within a person and within the relationships between people.
In City of Glass, the author actually sets up one of these ventriloquist metaphors for the reader. The protagonist, Quinn, is a writer of novels, and he uses a pen name: William Wilson. Quinn’s novels are mostly detective fiction and feature a protagonist named Max Work, who appears throughout all of his novels as the main character. The relationship between Quinn, William Wilson, and Max Work, as described by Auster, mimics the ventriloquist dynamic: "In the triad of selves that Quinn had become, Wilson served as a kind of ventriloquist, Quinn himself was the dummy, and Work was the animated voice that gave purpose to the enterprise. If Wilson was an illusion, he nevertheless justified the lives of the other two. If Wilson did not exist, he nevertheless was the bridge that allowed Quinn to pass from himself into Work" (Auster 12).
Wilson, Max Work, and Quinn are in essence all the same being, in that Work and Wilson do not technically exist. However, an entire fictional world is created due to Quinn’s split between himself, Work, and Wilson. Wilson is described as the “bridge that allows Quinn to pass from himself into Work,” emulating the function of the ventriloquist in an illusion. The ventriloquist links the dummy and voice, which are separate and unrelated entities on their own, therefore playing an indispensable role in creating the illusion; likewise, the identity of Wilson is indispensable in creating the illusion of the fictional reality within the detective novels. Thus, Wilson as the ventriloquist is also responsible for creating the voice-- Max Work. Just as the ventriloquist throws his or her own voice and essentially makes the voice appear as though it is its own entity, Wilson creates Max Work as his own identity. Finally, a ventriloquist typically assigns or syncs the voice to the dummy, completing the connection between the three of them and, as a result, giving an element of illusioned control to the dummy. In City of Glass, Quinn’s identity of Wilson creates Max Work, giving Quinn (the dummy) a voice in the apparatus. This can be interpreted as a conflict of subjectivity, in which Quinn did not feel like he otherwise had a sense of control or voice in his own life, relying upon his own ventriloquist and voice (Wilson and Work) within him to “assign” him that control.
This raises the ontological, postmodern question: what are the rules within the world one inhabits, and what can one do within that world? In the context of traditional, modern notions of reality in fictional worlds, one might assume that Quinn is or should be in control of Work and Wilson, since Work and Wilson are both “alter-ego”-type identities that exist within Quinn. However, describing the relationship and power dynamics between his three selves in the ventriloquist framework with Wilson defined specifically as the ventriloquist effectively shifts the readers entire perception of Quinn’s selves and who controls whom. This, subsequently, forces the reader to question who has the power to make things happen in a story. Is it the ventriloquist, who at the end of the day, illusion aside, is the one physically controlling the voice and the dummy? But defining Wilson as the ventriloquist even though he is simply a fictional identity of Quinn’s and doesn't actually exist (within Auster’s fictional world) suggests that the things that control us and our narratives are sometimes internal forces that are created within our own selves, rather than external forces. This, then, raises the question of what drives us to take certain action within our worlds (thus, what are we doing within our worlds and why?). Defining Quinn’s own identities in a ventriloquist framework with Wilson as the ventriloquist essentially forces the ontological questions of being upon the reader, thus making ventriloquism an effective lens to understand how postmodern literature aims to dislocate one’s perception about their own function and agency within life.
Auster (the author) further breaks down the nuances of power dynamics and manipulation by creating another triad; this time, however, the triad exists within the context of the actual plot of City of Glass. The relationship now is between Quinn, his identity as Paul Auster the detective (from here on referred to as “Paul”), and Peter Stillman, Jr. In this example, the ventriloquism metaphor is not explicitly stated but rather left for the reader to interpret. Peter is the mentally incapacitated man who mistakenly but repeatedly calls Quinn in the middle of the night asking for Paul Auster, the detective (Auster 13). Quinn eventually accepts the false identity of Paul and becomes entangled within the case of Peter Stillman, in which he and his wife/caretaker, Virginia, need a detective to keep watch on Peter’s recently-released-from-prison father, Stillman Sr., believing him to be out to get Peter. Thus, Paul (his legitimate identity as a character unknown for most of the story) becomes another alter-ego or identity of Quinn’s as he takes on Paul’s role, which was essentially handed to him by Peter via the phone call, and becomes involved in the case.
In reading into the ventriloquial nature of this triad, Quinn once again is placed at the center of the relationship as the lifeless dummy. Similar to the first metaphor, his alternate identity takes on the role of the voice, which is assigned to Quinn/the dummy by the ventriloquist orchestrating the entire apparatus: Peter. By placing those phone calls to Quinn, even if it was a mistaken number, Peter essentially “threw” out the voice of Paul to inhabit Quinn, completing the triad and acting as the link between Quinn and Paul (dummy and voice).
This once again has several implications about narrative control within a given world. Once again, assigning the voice of an alternate identity to Quinn gives him an element of control in his own life by giving him the opportunity to embark upon this case and move his own story in that direction. Inadvertently, Peter-- who seemingly has the overarching power in their dynamic and “creates” or offers up the voice of Paul-- gives control to an otherwise lifeless and stagnant Quinn the same way a ventriloquist uses his position of power to give an illusioned control to his dummy by providing it with a voice. The key word, however, is “illusioned” control: it may appear that Quinn is in control of his actions in the way that he goes about tracking Stillman Sr. and working on the case, but at the end of the day, Peter is the one orchestrating it behind the scenes-- thus, the control Quinn experiences is an illusion. This becomes evident to the reader later on in City of Glass, when Quinn becomes so heavily invested in the role delegated to him by Peter that he becomes progressively more unhinged, eventually choosing to live as a homeless man camped out by Peter’s building. The illusion is that Peter gives control to Quinn, allowing Quinn to seemingly make choices regarding how he will process at each point in the case. Quinn’s eventual unhinged-ness, however, serves as a reminder that he was actually an out-of-control “dummy” all along, moving through his given world driven by the manipulation by Peter, whether or not he knew it.
Again, this ventriloquial framing of a relationship between a person and their own identity raises questions of the power of free will to allow one to act a certain way or choose a certain path within their given situation. It forces the reader to question their perception of control and manipulation by asking who really has the power to control the narrative.
Agency
Beyond the concrete examples of ventriloquial relationships between characters, one can extend this understanding of ventriloquism to apply more broadly to the forms and techniques of metafiction. Agency is broadly defined as the capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power (Merriam-Webster). Within literature, this can be interpreted as a character’s ability to act or live freely within a defined world, or an author’s ability to make choices and exert control over the world or characters. Postmodern literary techniques often play with the notions of agency, and this is something that can be examined through the model of ventriloquism. When it comes to a ventriloquist and his dummy forming an illusion with a thrown voice, the illusion serves to question who is controlling the narrative, and by extension, who has the power?
Because the ventriloquist is behind the voice, is he or she controlling what happens? At the same time, the nature of the ventriloquist relationship and the illusion suggests that the dummy is in control of the narrative, with the words that appear to be coming from its mouth and the actions that appear to be independent of the ventriloquist-- thus the audience is meant to believe that the dummy is controlling the narrative by arguing with the ventriloquist or something to that effect. But still, at the root of it all is the ventriloquist quietly controlling the situation.
Within a piece of fiction, the reader makes the assumption that the author has written a novel with a narrator who is either omniscient or a character within the defined world. The idea of the author then becomes detached from the story and the world. Thus, when reading a piece of fiction, the characters have agency within their world, and this is the entire structure of modernist, traditional literature, at least within the genre of fiction. However, in postmodern metafiction, this assumption is often subverted. This can be done in many ways, but a particularly stark example can be found in City of Glass. There are several instances where the author, Paul Auster, inserts himself into the novel in various ways. Sometimes, the tone of the narration shifts and the reader gets the feeling that they are being spoken to directly, and they are suddenly privy to information that the characters are not. For example, when the narrator makes references to Quinn’s (the main character) dreams: “In his dream, which he later forgot, he found himself in the town dump of his childhood, sifting through a pile of rubbish” (Auster 113). Though subtle, there is a hint of an audience change--almost an aside to the reader-- as the narrator is telling the reader something that even the main character, Quinn, is not privy to-- as it is a dream which he had no recollection of. In essence, the narrator switches from standard indirect speech to free indirect speech, suggesting that the narrator can or has switched viewpoints and is not necessarily contained to just Quinn’s character.
This makes the reader also remember that the author is there-- almost like a reminder that this world is created by the author. This goes against traditional genre conventions in which the reader simply enters the world when they begin to read and it exists separately from the author.
In the narrative world, “the right to speech invariably conveys narrational power” (Altman 68). In City of Glass, Paul Auster uses techniques that essentially give himself the right to speech within the fictional world, whereas in traditional genre conventions, the author (though he or she creates the world) does not have a voice or right to speech within the world-- the agency is with the characters. This relationship between power, speech, and agency in metafiction echoes some of the power dynamics of a ventriloquial illusion: The ventriloquist, as the agent, gives the dummy the right to speech, effectively giving the dummy a kind of narrational power within the illusion and shifting the agency to the dummy.
Unreliable Narration
Another way in which the ventriloquist model and relationship sets up a lens through which to understand postmodern literary techniques is by echoing the idea of unreliable narration. When considering the dynamic of a ventriloquist's illusion, as stated previously, the audience is meant to be confused by the thrown voice. Although the voice is being manipulated and created by the ventriloquist, the throwing of the voice causes it to appear and sound as though it is coming from somewhere else in the room. When a ventriloquist uses a dummy, the voice and dummy are manipulated in a way that makes it appear as though the dummy is the owner of the voice and thus the “narrator,” or one who is in control of the narrative/dialogue between the ventriloquist and dummy (Goldblatt 391). In effect, the entire illusion of ventriloquism is a form of unreliable narration.
Similarly, in the 1970’s and 1980’s--City of Glass was written in 1987—"postmodernism was most centrally associated with an extremely self-referential and often openly anti-realist type of narrative…[involving]...narrators whose identities remain ambiguous” (Cassuto and Heise 966). This serves to undermine the sense of a shared reality and reality in general, contributing to the antirealist themes in postmodernism. City of Glass offers an interesting example of unreliable narration. It is important to note that this exploration of narration differs from the analysis of agency because in the context of agency, the author’s narration is more so about his relation to the characters and who he chooses to give power to in the narrative, while in the context of unreliable narration, the discussion focuses more on the author’s relationship to the story itself.
Throughout the novel, it is unclear to the reader whether the narrator is Paul Auster himself (the author), some omniscient storyteller, or someone else, and what relation the narrator has to the story. The first major instance where there is a clear separation between the narrator and the story is on page 173; chapter 12 opens with, “A long time passed...the account of this period is less full than the author would have liked. But information is scarce, and he has preferred to pass over in silence what could not be definitely confirmed” (Auster 173).
In this instance, readers experience the jarring extrication of the narrator from the story-- if the narrator didn’t know what happened, then who would? Additionally, the way the narrator refers to the author as “the author” by speaking in the third person disjoints the narrative as well. Typically, the assumption is made that an author is narrating the story if it is in the third person. But here, the reader begins to wonder about the true identity of the narrator and whether it bears significance upon the story.
Quinn’s story supposedly ends early, and the remainder of the novel shifts to focus on the narrator. Here, the reader discovers that the narrator is seemingly a friend of Paul Auster (the character within the novel). Through character-Auster, the friend found Quinn’s red notebook and it becomes clear that the entire novel was written based on his interpretation of the contents of Quinn’s notebook. At this point, the story itself becomes unreliable because it is simply a reiteration of Quinn’s notes into a narrative format. This friend of character-Auster’s who found the notebook only wrote the story based on what Quinn wrote, and this both fictionalizes the narrator and also adds another layer of subjectivity to the story.
Additionally, Quinn’s mental state was clearly declining as he became invested in the case and took it to the point of living as a homeless man outside Peter and Virginia Stillmans’ building for months. If the narrative is simply based upon the notes Quinn wrote in a questionable mental state, the reader is forced to question the reliability of it. Traditionally, a narrator is either omniscient, the author themself, or first-person/the main character. However, in City of Glass, the narrator is revealed at the end to be a character within the story who isn’t actually a part of the story at all. As soon as the narrator hints at their identity and the perception of the story changes, what the reader “knows” to be true within the fictional world of the story is questioned.
The use of Auster as a character also introduces the question of how deeply that character is based off of Paul Auster, the author. If he is not based upon the author, then character-Auster and his friend, the narrator, are completely fictitious, and in a very obscure position to narrate the story, rendering the story quite fragile. On the other hand, if character-Auster is based on author-Auster, his narrator friend may also be based off of a real-life friend. This suggests, then, that some elements of the story may be true to life. This metafictional novel takes an antirealist approach by using an unreliable narration to alter the readers’ perception and sense of reality. To bring this into the context of ventriloquism, and finally knowing the identity of the narrator, one can approach the narration of City of Glass with a ventriloquist frame: the ventriloquist being Paul Auster, the author; the voice being the narrator (the friend of Paul Auster the character); and the dummy being Quinn, because the reader’s perception of Quinn is formed by the narrator’s voice, which is ultimately manipulated by Paul Auster (author). The overall effect is a somewhat muddled reality and an illusion of alterity similar to the one created by an actual act of ventriloquism.
The relationship between a ventriloquist, a dummy, and a thrown voice sets up an illusion that plays with power dynamics and blurs the source of control. In City of Glass in particular, the ventriloquial framework can be applied in many different ways in order to analyze and understand the nuances of postmodern questions of agency within one’s world. Auster (the author) sets up multiple different identity triads that take on a ventriloquial relationship, examples being Quinn/Max Work/William Wilson and Quinn/Paul Auster (detective)/Peter Stillman. Examining the ventriloquial nature of those relationships reveals an effort to fracture the sense of a shared reality and make the reader question what it means to have agency. Beyond the specific textual examples, the overall goal of a ventriloquial illusion is to make the audience question their own perception of who has narrative control in the apparatus; likewise, many postmodern literary techniques address similar goals, often raising the question of what one’s relation is to their world and what they can do within it.
Works Cited
Altman, Rick. “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism.” Yale French Studies, no. 60, Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 67–79, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930005.
Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Penguin Books, 1987.
Cassuto, Leonard, and Ursula Heise. “Postmodern Novels.” The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
Goldblatt, David. “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Artwork.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3, [Wiley, American Society for Aesthetics], 1993, pp. 389–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/431511.
Goldstein, Diane E. “Rethinking Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice to Speak For, About, and Without.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 49, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 179–98, https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.49.2.179.
“Ventriloquism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/art/ventriloquism.
“Ventriloquism.” The Chicago School of Media Theory RSS, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/ventriloquism/.
“Ventriloquism - What & Why?” International Ventriloquist Society, 23 Aug. 2018, https://ventriloquistsociety.com/ventriloquism/ventriloquism/.
Webster, Noah. “Agency.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Pocket Books, 1977. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agency
Altman, Rick. “Moving Lips: Cinema as Ventriloquism.” Yale French Studies, no. 60, Yale University Press, 1980, pp. 67–79, https://doi.org/10.2307/2930005.
Auster, Paul. City of Glass. Penguin Books, 1987.
Cassuto, Leonard, and Ursula Heise. “Postmodern Novels.” The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011.
Goldblatt, David. “Ventriloquism: Ecstatic Exchange and the History of the Artwork.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 51, no. 3, [Wiley, American Society for Aesthetics], 1993, pp. 389–98, https://doi.org/10.2307/431511.
Goldstein, Diane E. “Rethinking Ventriloquism: Untellability, Chaotic Narratives, Social Justice, and the Choice to Speak For, About, and Without.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 49, no. 2, Indiana University Press, 2012, pp. 179–98, https://doi.org/10.2979/jfolkrese.49.2.179.
“Ventriloquism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/art/ventriloquism.
“Ventriloquism.” The Chicago School of Media Theory RSS, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/ventriloquism/.
“Ventriloquism - What & Why?” International Ventriloquist Society, 23 Aug. 2018, https://ventriloquistsociety.com/ventriloquism/ventriloquism/.
Webster, Noah. “Agency.” The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, Pocket Books, 1977. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agency