Trying This & Trying That

richard ford on authenticity in the “complex music” of fictional voice.Engravings from Isaac Fuller and Pierce Tempest, Iconologia: or, moral emblems …. Wherein are express’d various images of virtues, vices, passions, etc. as design’d by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and modern Italians … / illustrated with … humane figures, with their explanations; newly design’d, and engraven … by I. Fuller … and other masters, 1709. Credit: Wellcome.

…all authority and authenticity, all the enchantments of a story’s voice, just as in dance, in photography, in film and sculpture, arise not from some semi-sacred central mass, but from the outside in: from unplanned impulse, from luck, sometimes—okay—from design and application, but always from trying this and trying that. From hit or miss. It’s how artifice works, and it is not so different from how we make life be life.

— Richard Ford, “Whose Voice?,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2023