It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
The literary term “voice” is something completely different from the “voice” in this sentence. Here, the voice is a literal voice: Calvino is rephrasing a core tenet of storytelling in that the narrator is not the only creator of the story. The listener is an active and equally-important participant in every story—the writer writes it, but the reader constructs it.
Last week: Byron goes boldly.
Next week: W. H. Auden shows guts.
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