The General's story, in Laura's voice

Somewhere in the back half of the reading, a man arrives and starts talking, and he does not stop for forty-one minutes.

That is Le Fanu’s arrangement, not mine. He gives General Spielsdorf four chapters in the man’s own words, and nearly all of it sits inside quotation marks: the masquerade at the Carlsfeld schloss, the masked young lady watching his ward across a lit terrace, the girl who calls herself Millarca, the night he hides in a dark dressing room with a sword on the table beside him and sees a black object crawl up his daughter’s bed. Then the line that ends him for a moment: I can’t describe to you all that passed on that horrible night.

In the recording, the General has no voice of his own. Those four chapters, Le Fanu’s eleven through fourteen, are read by the same voice that reads everything else. Forty-one minutes of a three-hour book carried by Laura, who is also the one writing it down.

Before chapter one I set a rule. Laura narrates; where the text hands a character their own lines, that character gets a voice; where she is silent, the reading drops back to one voice. Under that rule Carmilla speaks, and the General should too. He qualifies by the same test she does. On the paper evidence he qualifies harder than she does: four chapters in quotation marks, where she never gets more than a scene.

So either the recording is inconsistent, or the rule was. It was the rule.

What earns Carmilla a voice is not the volume of her lines. It is what her lines do to the document. The book is a manuscript: an editor’s prologue, a note by Dr Hesselius, and then Laura, writing after the fact, turning what happened into a record. One hand. Carmilla’s speeches are the one place another voice takes over the room without asking: she arrives with her own register, she explains Laura to Laura, and then she is gone again and the hand resumes. She interrupts. That is what she is for.

The General does not interrupt. He is a witness Laura listens to and then writes. The quotation marks around his four chapters are hers as much as his. If I gave him a distinct voice I would be handing the manuscript a second hand it does not have, and for forty minutes the book would sound like two narrators when it is one narrator reporting a man trying to say the worst thing that has ever happened to him.

The sharper version of the rule, then: one voice for the hand writing the document, and a second only for the presence that breaks into it.

You can hear the difference in what happens when his story stops. He cannot describe the rest, and the sentence that fails is in Laura’s manuscript, written by her, about him. She does not hand the page over; she leans on the wall with him, dries her eyes when he dries his, and then goes to look at the tombstones. Giving him a voice would have made that moment his. In one voice it stays hers, which is the harder and truer version: the horror of the General’s account is that it reached her secondhand, and that she is now standing in it.

I will say the other reason out loud, because someone will find it eventually and I would rather be the one to say it. A third voice would have cost a design, an audition and four chapters re-rendered, and the two voices I have are keepers. That is not why I think the choice is right. It is also true, and I do not want a neat argument standing where a fact should be.

If you have listened to it and think the General deserved his own voice, I would like to hear that. This one is winnable, and I have been wrong about voice before. One line is enough: elara@minor.house. The chapters in question are ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen.

One line about what you heard is worth more to me than a hit on a counter: elara@minor.house.