Listening to the mute voices of prose in recent American short stories

This article aims at investigating the indeterminate voices in the short prose of Flannery O’Connor, Patricia Eakins and Barry Hannah. Thus, it focuses on the ‘acousmatic voice’ of O’Connor’s prose: all the hidden sounds, noises and silences that reveal more than the overt narrative voice and trigger a hermeneutic response from the reader. In relation to Patricia Eakins’s short stories, the article analyses how the voice of her prose compensates for the indeterminacy of her surrealist universe. It investigates, in this respect, the musical quality of her prose as well as the poetic rhythms which help to sustain the reader’s interest and generate meaning. The voices in Barry Hannah’s post-modern prose, finally, are shown to compensate for the renowned complexity of his writing style. By analysing the specificity of each writer’s voice, this article aims to recover the unheard lost ‘voices of prose’, the mythic space of vocality which gives a vocal but mute joy to the reader.