“The Virgin Suicides” by Jeffrey Eugenides: In video, author describes genesis of first novel as “dictated” by “literary voice.” What is literary voice?

Jeffrey Eugenides begins his brief video on writing his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, by talking about the “literary voice” that came to him. He describes it as a “mystical” experience that “dictates the novel” (1).

What is a literary voice? It is not a psychotic hallucination, since authors know, objectively, that it comes from their own mind. Yet it is not experienced as simply their own thought, their own ideas, or as a product of their own imagination. It seems to involve an independent intelligence that somehow, more or less, points in the right direction, or, as Eugenides says, dictates the novel.

If the literary voice were merely the author’s or narrator’s style, then it would have been called “literary style.” But it’s not called that, and to define it that way is to avoid and ignore the fiction writer’s subjective experience.

The extent to which the writer’s literary voice is an auditory experience, per se, will vary from writer to writer. Some writers say that they hear voices in their head. Others would not say that they hear them, because it comes from inside, not outside. But the defining attribute is that it does not feel like something they, themselves, have or would have, thought or imagined.

Since Eugenides recalls that a baby sitter had once mentioned to him that she and her sisters had contemplated suicide, why does he invoke the idea of a literary voice? Why doesn’t he simply say that the novel is his own elaboration of that idea?

Because that’s not how he experienced it. I would speculate that one of his alternate personalities did, out of his regular personality’s awareness, work on that idea, and was the voice for this novel that eventually came to him.

1. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/04/13/jeffrey-eugenides-on-the-virgin-suicides/