Malapropsim

“Her voice. It was as if Walser Had become a prisoner of her voice, her cavernous, somber voice, a voice made for shouting about the tempest, her voice of a celestial fishwife. Musical as it was, yet not a voice for singing with; it comprised discords, her scale contained twelve notes. Her voice, with its warped, homely, Cockney vowels and random aspirates. Her dark, rusty, dipping, swooping voice, imperious as a siren’s.

Yet such a voice could almost have had its source, not within her throat but in some ingenious mechanism or other behind the canvas screen, voice of a fake medium at a séance” (43).

This passage seems relevant to the discussion of “delicate malapropisms”. Carter notes that Walser is in some captive to Fevvers voice, yet the description of what exactly captivates him is unclear. That is, the timbre of the voice itself is a discontinuous as it is initially described as both “somber and cavernous” yet also embodies an angelic and disruptive quality. Carter continues that it is seemingly musical but not in the conventional sense. Rather, this is musical discord is comprised of two things that produce an uncertain authoritative quality. More succinctly, her distinct regional tone and ambiguous pattern or paces of speech are factors which entrance the young journalist. Moreover, Carter explains that even by reducing the voice to its component parts, it still maintained an unnamable disembodied quality of some secret clerical origin. In short, it seems that Carter is expressing Fevver’s voice- her medium of communicating her life story to the young journalist- as one endowed with an ominous authority that is undefinable. In some way Carter seems to suggest Fevver’s narrative has a mystical truth about it, in some way resembling a kind of religious authority. It is important to note that this passage comes briefly after Walser mistakes the amount of time that has passed, an experience that Carter frames as one that is seemingly real to Walser, and thus reads as somewhat surreal to readers. With that in mind, the latter passage is purposefully unclear in order to convey the entire experience thus far as one that may or not be entirely grounded in reality. Perhaps Carter is expressing in very subtle terms the surreal actuality of such a candid diatribe performed by a woman during the early 1900’s. There is a sense that what is surreal is not that fact that this woman has wings but rather that she has commanded Walsers undivided attention, and our own, by her frankness alone. Maybe Carter is pointing out that in order to listen to one another meaningfully we require an arbitrary ambiguity with respect to one another. What is worth knowing is not what we say to one another, but how we say such things.