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Content THE MYTHOLOGY OF VOICE
by
Darsie Minor Bowden
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1991
Copyright 1991
Darsie Minor Bowden
UMI Number: DP23152
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This dissertation, w ritten by
Darsie Minor Bowden
under the direction of h .ex . Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted b y The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirem ents for the degree of
D O C TO R OF PHILOSOPH Y
Deart o f G raduate Studies
D a te J“ iy ..2 6 * ..i? 9 i
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
T k X>.
£ •
iysf
ii
Acknowledgments
As with most dissertations, this could not have been completed without the j
support and contributions of a great many people. Foremost among them is :
the chair of my dissertation committee, W. Ross Winterowd, who guided this
dissertation from its inception to completion. I am also indebted to
members of my committee, Leo Braudy, Edward Finegan, and Donald
Freeman for their discerning questions and comments, and their valuable
advice. Finally, I owe an enormous debt to James Gee whose work— even
though he may not have agreed with the uses to which I put it-has
influenced me enormously and whose suggestions and encouragement during
the writing of this dissertation helped make this project immeasurably better
than it might have been. 1
THE M YTHOLOGY OF VOICE
INTRODUCTION
In charting the state of the art in composition and literary theory, one
might well choose "voice" as a pivotal term. It figures with great frequency
in interpretations of literary and non-literary texts, and is a recurrent topic in
Idiscussions of student writing, the composing process, and the philosophy of
i
i
language. Just as most metaphors shape the way we conceptualize events
and phenomena, voice conditions our orientation toward texts in two
important ways. First, it metaphorically locks together speaker and writer,
raising expectations that both can be examined the same way; and, second, it
gives the speaker/writer a privileged status in the rhetorical act.
i
i
J Voice has been used to describe not only an author’s perspective, but
i
also the author’s style, both of which assume a text has features that can be
ascribed to a certain ethos or persona. More often than not, this is the ethos
of the author or of a narrator or of a mediation between the two. But the
/
characterizations of this persona in contemporary literature about voice as
well as definitions of voice itself have been hazy at best. Can a narrator’s
I
voice, for example, be understood in terms of linguistic patterns such as
passive constructions, nominalizations, or parataxis? Or, as is occasionally
the case in poetry, can authorial voice be recognized by certain syntactic and
thematic configurations in the works of particular authors (as, for example, in
2
the works of Donne, Keats, or T.S. Eliot)? Can an author’s or narrator’s
voice be the creation of a tone or a framing device that results in satire,
irony, or parody? Finally— although these possibilities are hardly all-inclusive
or discrete from one other-is the narrating voice simply that ego that
maintains the floor, the one who speaks, or calls herself " I" in a text, the one
who anchors the text, locking it into a specific point of view or subjectivity?
In this study, I will examine the term "voice," its relation to the
speaking voice, and its various applications to literature and literary theory
and to composition theory. In the early chapters I will show that many of
the critical and theoretical applications might be problematic precisely /
because they fail to account for key distinctions between speaking and
writing. Speakers have a voiceprint that is unique, identifiable and personal.
;They make use of intonation, inflection, stress, and pitch, as well as other
i
nonverbal signs and signals to shape meaning in ways that writers cannot.
Writers, because they are not physically present when their texts are read,
have far less control over how their texts are interpreted and by whom.
They cannot depend on any personal presence to convey meaning nor can
they monitor response or alter the texts to react to misreadings or
misunderstandings. In a very real sense, writers lose a good portion of their
voices and the power that goes with it.
The theory I propose to replace existing theories of voice insists on a
sociolinguistic view of language and speech acts. I maintain that all
3 1
/ I
utterances are at once individual and social, never exclusively the one or the j
other, but always emerging in a tension between two poles. Therefore ethos^ !
or voice cannot be the creation of the speaker alone, but is always
conditioned by the rhetorical task and the audience. Because the voice is
detached from the text in writing, we should focus our attention not on the
voice of the author, but on ethos, and this does not necessarily emanate from
a specific person. Rather I am promoting a managerial metaphor of
discourse, where the writer, in negotiation with the reader, manages j
l
discourses within a text, resulting in the creation of a particular ethos. !
j I
j Using a number of texts ranging from academic writing and student j
i
compositions to literary prose (including a treatment of Truman Capote’s
'short novel, The Grass HarpY . I will look at some specific ways ethos is
created. I will show that each persona in a text, whether it be that of an
author, narrator, or character, is always in varying degrees embroiled in a
conflict with other personae, having distinctive discourse styles. The writer
i
may bring these discourses into the text consciously in the form of quotation
and indirect or reported discourse, or may invoke them unconsciously through
the use of register variations or discursive conventions from other genres. I
will make the case that these other discourses tend to undermine the
dominant speaker (often the narrator) at the same time as they are used to
i support that speaker’s positions or claims, so that at each moment the
speaker’s control is imperiled. It is this tension or conflict, I will argue, that
I N
imakes rhetoric and literature possible. Weak writers are themselves often
(dominated, not only by the "voices" or discourses they incorporate, but by the
"voice" of the reader. Strong writers manage the discourses, including the j
reader’s, and control them to such a degree that the experience of the reader j
i
includes the feeling of having encountered an authorial ethos, not some
polyglossic, confused textual Babel.
! Where voice plays its largest role, however, is in reading. Using the
I
results of a number of different studies of reading, I will argue that the act
i
of reading is an act of voicing or "revoking" a text. I will use reading
protocols to illustrate how readers of various proficiencies read, and show
that the reader, ultimately, has the definitive voice. Readers bring the text
back onto an aural plane, supplying intonation, inflection, and stress as well
as context as they re-personalize the text, bringing it into their "lifeworld" on
i \
Itheir own terms and in their own voices. Writing is, in a sense then, a p
i
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jscripting of a voice for the reader.
5
CHAPTER O NE - The V oice in Literature
When stories came to be written, narrators retained (though not
inevitably) strong personal marks-referring to themselves as " I" ;
offering judgments, opinions, generalizations; describing then-
own persons or habitats, and the like. The term "voice" was
naturally, if figuratively, transferred to represent the means by
which those activities occurred. It is a metaphor that continues
to be widely used but insufficiently examined by narratology . .
. . [N]o one to my knowledge has asked whether it really
clarifies what it is supposed to name. (Seymour Chatman,
Coming to Terms. 118)
Margaret Atwood begins her novel Bodily Harm with the following
sentence: "This is how I got here, says Rennie." (11) After a paragraph
break, the narrative begins in earnest, using the first-person pronoun: "It was
|the day after Jake left. I walked back to the house around five. I’d been
I
I
over at the market and I was carrying the shopping basket as well as my
purse." In so doing, Atwood sets up a narrative framework in which the
main character, Rennie, is explaining her situation and "saying" or telling her
story to a narrator. We are given no indication whom she is speaking to or
what occasioned the narrative. After four pages, there is a break, at which
1
1
point the narrative switches to the third person; the telling of Rennie’s story
is no longer in her own words, or at least this is what a reader might
assume. The narrator, however, seems to be the same, but now the
audience-through the third-person narrative-is privy as much to what Rennie
is thinking as to what she is doing:
j There’s a two-hour stopover in Barbados, or so they tell her.
I Rennie finds the women’s washroom in the new Muzak-slick
I airport and changes from her heavy clothes to a cotton dress.
She examines her face in the mirror, checking for signs. In fact
she looks quite well, she looks normal. (15)
What is not clear at this point and what is never entirely clear— in this novel
as well as many others-is the distinction between what Rennie is presumed
to be telling the narrator and what the narrator interprets or "knows" by the
I
)
narrative convention of omniscience. What portion of the description of
!
i Rennie’s thoughts is her own account of what she is thinking? On the other
hand, what does the narrator know from being able to see inside Rennie’s
mind, thoughts which Rennie may or may not be aware of? To put it a
different way, whose voice is speaking? And, perhaps more important, what
does it matter that we know?
i
i
t
j Rennie is a free-lance journalist, who travels to the Caribbean island
I of St. Antoine to recuperate from the physical and emotional trauma of
cancer surgery. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, from her
activities and relationships on St. Antoine to her life in Toronto and her
childhood in Griswold. If Rennie is actually participating in a dialogue with
the narrator, the reader is never privy to the narrator’s response, with the
result that Rennie often appears to be narrating her story herself. But upon
occasion the narrator injects herself into the text-mostly by reminding the
reader that the narrative is a story being told to her ("Rennie says") or,
although perhaps less conceivably, suggesting the possibility that Rennie is
telling someone else and that the narrator is reporting on this telling. The
narrative source is thus potentially plural and multi-layered, and, more often
than not, ambiguous. Furthermore, the narrator’s discourse and Rennie’s
seem to be intertwined to such an extent that in the last few pages of the
inovel, where Rennie is imprisoned after a violent military coup, it becomes
difficult to know who is speaking and, further, to know what is to be
•understood as truth and what is illusion. When finally on page 293 the
narrator begins a short passage by saying, "This is what will happen," a
reader cannot be certain whether this is Rennie’s fantasy or the narrator’s
reporting of future events. The sudden shift to future tense adds to the
■ mystification.
| This example is not atypical of narratives in literary fiction. The
'problem of separating out and classifying the different perspectives or
narrative points of view is the primary objective of many prominent
narratologists. Literary theorists such as Gerard Genette (Narrative
i
I Discourse). Wayne Booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction), and Seymour Chatman
f
| (Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film) are
I
among those who have sought to define the role that the narrator plays in a
i text, and to determine and, so far as possible, codify that narrator’s
i.
t relationship to the author, the characters, and the reader(s). A metaphor
that all three of these theorists have used is "voice," which functions largely
i
jto help characterize the "who" of a text: who is speaking, who is the author,
8
who is the " I" of a text, although this "who" is often very troublesome to
isolate.
In Narrative Discourse. Gerard Genette is interested in defining what
he calls the "generating instance of narrative discourse" (213) or the
I
■"narrating instance" (219). To this end, he makes certain distinctions, one of
which is between mood and voice. Mood, according to Genette, responds to
the question, "Who is the character whose point of view orients the narrative
j
i perspective?" Voice, on the other hand, refers to the narrator, the "who"
that is speaking (13). One of Genette’s primary goals is to identify the
subjectivity that seems to control a text: Is the "who" of the text the subject
I
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; of the action, the person who reports it, or the person who participates in it?
I would add some additional questions: Does the "who” of a text seem to
i
control the discourse and the story? In Bodily Harm, does Rennie seem to
control the text or does the anonymous narrator? In either case, how is this
control achieved? Why is this control important?
Genette’s method of responding to the problem of subjectivity of a
text is to demarcate the different levels of the narrating instance. One way
these can be marked is temporally; that is, the narrating instance may be
prior to, simultaneous with, or subsequent to the narrated action. It can also
be "interpolated" (217) or appear in some combination of these, as illustrated
above in Atwood’s Bodily Harm, where the narrating instance shifts from
near past to distant past and from present to future. In an earlier work
! 9
|
(Figures II). Genette defines narratives in terms of degrees of narrative
distance: extradiegetic, metadiegetic, pseudodiegetic, or autodiegetic, to name
I
several but not all possible variations. These designations apply to the
narrator’s relationship to the story he is telling, but refer more to narrative
function than to narrator’s role as a character in the plot. Metadiegetic is
what Genette calls "second-degree" narrative, which is a second narrative
explaining or elucidating a primary narrative. This second or meta-level is
another narrative world, and it appears intermittently in novels such as
Wuthering Heights and Tristram Shandy where a narrator comments on the
first-level narration. Autodiegetic narrating is more or less autobiographical,
that is, one telling about oneself, such as the Proustian narrator of A la
{ recherche du temps perdu.
i
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! In addition, Genette makes distinctions between homodiegetic and
iheterodiegetic narrative levels, the former referring to cases in which the
i
i J
! narrator is a character in the story he tells, the latter to cases in which he is j
< i
absent. The narrating presence in Bodily Harm is heterodiegetic; in other !
words, the narrator has no role in the story she tells, at least none that is
readily apparent to the reader.
The classification system that Genette has developed is not
unproblematic, a fact that Genette readily admits. These levels interact and
|
intersect as in the case of author-narrator-hero figure of Marcel in Recherche
{who moves in and out of his story, the narration seeming occasionally to
10
shift "voices." In Bodily Harm, the narrator seems to become Rennie, and
Rennie becomes the narrator, each subjectivity intruding upon the other and
resulting in a hybridization of the narrating presence so that it would be
difficult to tell who is actually speaking or, at least, to locate that presence
in a particular person or a particular persona. In fact, this hybridization
i
seems to occur more often in narratives than it might at first seem. It is a
narrative conceit that a particular narrator such as Ishmael in Moby Dick has
inside knowledge of the workings of the minds of the characters he depicts
even though he is a character himself. After all, both narrator and
characters (Ahab, his crew, and Moby Dick himself) are constructions of an
| author who creates psychological states and personalities as much as he
j
directs the action of the plot. It seems both fitting and acceptable to have
the subjectivity that narrates take on different personae as the story
progresses and have (perhaps unrealistic) insight about the other characters
| as such an insight might suit the overarching goals of the author.
J A interesting distinction can be made by examining oral narratives.
!
Oral storytelling, generally speaking, has a stable speaker, that is to say, a
real person tells the story; that person is usually physically present at the
scene of the telling (obvious exceptions are recordings and radio
i
transmissions). The teller, who may or may not be the author, recounts the
j
story from start to finish; the actual speaking voice emanates from the same
source and has a certain continuity, operating within the vocal range of the
11
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speaker, even though vocal character may fluctuate as the story is told. That
speaker, however, is always capable of creating a story persona that is
neither stable from one telling to the next nor essentially tied to the actual
person recounting the story. In other words, that persona has a narrative
|
function that does not necessarily have as its locus that physical person
telling the story. A person can tell a story in a variety of different ways,
taking on a different ethos to better tell her story and affect a particular
l
: audience.
Plato scrutinizes this skill at creating multiple personae in his Ion in
which Socrates questions the value of the rhapsodist’s art. Ion, by
profession, is a rhapsodist, a teller of tales-those by Homer, for example. In
'order to perform his art, he "loses his senses," just as lyric poets do in the
act of composing. Ion is possessed by the power of the story he recites; at
the time of recitation he is not in his right mind. Thus, it can be construed
I that Ion takes on a narrating persona or a narrating function that emanates
not necessarily from himself but from his material. In other words, he
assumes a role in order to tell the story, a role that takes him out of his
j personal senses and into a "sense" or "narrating instance" that serves the
telling, although this may not necessarily be the dominant narrating instance
* of the story. For example, the Iliad has a narrator in and of itself, yet when
I
a rhapsodist such as Ion recites it, he assumes a narrating stance that is an
amalgam of his own personal presence and the presence of the Iliad’s
narrator. Of course, this "leaving one’s senses" is a problem for Plato
because it introduces an element of deceit; the narrating Ion is possessed and
potentially can arouse his listeners so that they too become possessed by a
subjectivity other than their own (whatever that might be). This storytelling
i exchange, therefore, cannot serve an audience very well in illustrating any
i
i
kind of truth-or at least the specific kind of truth that Plato is after-and
this is the quest that is of paramount important for Plato. (For further
discussion, see Chapter 2.)
Because literary narrative, at least that which is read silently to
oneself, is "authorless" in the sense that both creator and teller-as actual
i <
J persons-are absent from the scene in which it is read, the problem of
determining the "who" of a text is different. Wayne Booth’s discussions in
The Rhetoric of Fiction underscore the particular dilemma in this enterprise.
In a chapter entitled "The Author’s Voice in Fiction," Booth examines such
j narrative conventions as authorial commentary (reliable and unreliable),
dramatized narrators, and the implied author. He considers how dramatic
irony works, and the author’s-as well as the narrator’s-role in shaping
beliefs and controlling expectations. He also takes some pains to distinguish
the " I" of the text (or narrator) from the implied image of the author.
Perhaps the most important concept for our purposes arises from his
discussion of the implied author.
As [an author] writes, he creates not simply an ideal,
impersonal "man in general" but an implied version of "himself"
that is different from the implied authors we meet in other
men’s works. To some novelists it has seemed, indeed, that
they were discovering or creating themselves as they wrote . . .
Whether we call this implied author an "official scribe," or
adopt the term recently revived by Kathleen Tillotson-the
author’s "second self"-it is clear that the picture the reader gets
! of this presence is one of the author’s most important effects.
(71)
While Booth makes a case in the above passage for the reader’s role in the
determination of who or what this scribe is-and this forms the principal
argument in favor of the rhetorical nature of literary discourse--his discussion
i
is still focused on what appear to be stable forms located in the text. Using
these forms, the author creates a presence that is situated in the text, ready
for the reader to uncover. Although Booth would argue that this "second
t
■ self" is created via the text in the mind of the reader, his focus remains
largely text and author-based. It is something an author creates as she writes "
(though this presence may or may not obfuscate the "real" author); it is the
author’s "second self," locatable in the text. The apparent disregard for the
reader is exacerbated by Booth’s use of the voice metaphor, which he uses in
reference to the implied author (or second self). The voice of the implied
author may or may not correspond with the voices of the author, narrator,
i
character, or narrator-character, but in any case it emanates from the author.
In both Booth’s and Genette’s work, there is also an insistence on the
important role of the addressee who is "spoken to." Genette refers to this
! 14
I
entity being addressed as the narratee or "implied reader." The narratee is
on the same diegetic level as the narrator, but is not necessarily the reader,
just as the narrator is not necessarily the author. Both Genette and Booth
assume that there is some importance in making these distinctions, in
unravelling these strands, in separating out what is author, what is narrator,
t
iwhat is implied author. Part of the insistence may stem from the value-
specific to Western culture-attached to being able to identify a voice that
one hears and to locate presence in that voice. Perhaps these distinctions
are in response to a need to replace the voice in oral storytelling with a
!
comparable voice; to identify that voice heard in a reader’s imagination— if
that is indeed what occurs-when a reader read the story. In oral
storytelling, the voice we hear is the actual voice of the storyteller. This
voice may belong to a person who is possessed or out of his senses, but it is
Ivery strongly the voice of the storyteller; it is his interpretation of the
written cues. Here and in the subsequent chapters, I argue that, in the act
of reading, this voice we hear may be our own; that is, the voice of a text
imay be the voice of the reader. Genette indicates this possibility when he
I
writes the following passage (citing Proust):
[I]n order to read with understanding many readers require to
read in their own particular fashion, and the author must not
be indignant at this; on the contrary, he must leave the reader
i all possible liberty, because the work is ultimately, according to
I Proust himself, only an optical instrument the author offers the
reader to help him read within himself. "For it is only out of a
habit, a habit contracted from the insincere language of
15
j prefaces and dedications, that the writer speaks of ‘my reader.’
i In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his
! own self." (261)
Although to my mind this would suggest shifting the emphasis of the
discussion to the reader, Genette seems reluctant to do so. Proust, more
than Genette, appears to be convinced of the importance not only of reading
I
in one’s own "particular fashion," but also of the relationship of that reader
to the reader’s own self and, by extension, to his-the reader’s-world.
Seymour Chatman’s most recent book Coming To Terms begins where
■Booth and Genette have left off, and, of the three theorists I examine here,
i
Chatman seems to acknowledge most fully the role of the reader. The
discussion relevant to my purposes is his treatment of the implied author.
Both Booth and Chatman see the implied author as the central organizing
j force in a narrative. The implied author selects what we read and as Booth
argues, "we infer him as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man;
he is the sum of his own choices" (74-5). Because Booth views the implied
author as a literary version of a "man," it is easy to regard what this literary
I
version of what a real man says as the emanations of his "voice." Thus
I . .
voice becomes an integral and highly functional part of the metaphorical
scheme of an implied author. But where Booth believes that the implied
I author has a particular voice in the text, Chatman argues that the implied
author of a text has no voice; the implied author is neither author nor
narrator, but is a presence created by "reading between the lines" and hence
16
is in part a creation of the reader. In place of implied author, Chatman
would like to substitute the terms "text implication," "text instance," or "text
design" (86), implying that the text provides a pattern or blueprint that serves
I
, to shape the presence that the reader images in the act of reading.
! The narrator, and she or he alone, is the only subject, the only
"voice" of narrative discourse. The inventor of that speech, as
of the speech of the characters, is the implied author. That
inventor is no person, no substance, no object: it is, rather, the
patterns in the text which the reader negotiates. (87)
While the narrator may speak, the inventor or implied author does not. This
I
! distinction helps to clarify some of the issues that concern unreliable
narration, irony, and satire. The narrator of Tale of a Tub is not the
implied author; the beliefs of the narrator do not directly reflect the beliefs
of the implied author, and a reader understands this if she truly understands
the message of Tale of a Tub. Readers construct different inventors or
implied authors for texts (based on elements that I will investigate in a later
chapter) that have only loose connections to the real author. There is the
implied author of Bodily Harm, and there is Margaret Atwood and these
i
may or may not intersect as readers try to establish intentions1 and figure out
for themselves what the text means.
If the inventor or implied author does not speak, or has no voice in a
text, what are the implications? One of these, as Chatman argues, is that we
can have a definition of a narrator that allows for non-human as well as
human agents. We tend to anthropomorphize points of view ("point of view"
being a visual metaphor, also borrowed from narratology as well as from
Renaissance treatises on perspective) in other narrative modes as well as the
literary. Chatman refers to the cinema where the camera is often referred
to as the "eye" and provides the point of view in the telling of a tale.
i
/ "Voice" is in a similar position in that as we use it, we anthropomorphize a
i
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textual phenomenon that may or may not be centered in an individual
person.2 One of the problems with voice and eye is that in using these
terms we fail to acknowledge that when we "image" the implied author or
I
narrating instance, especially in the reading of texts, we do so on multiple
i
j sensory levels: we see, hear, even feel the textual interest-focus or slant or
filter (Chatman’s terms).3 Thus "author" may be too human a metaphor for
this phenomenon.
Even while Chatman shifts the focus to the reader, however, he
{continues to try to make distinctions that are text-based (or film-based),
between, for example, who utters the text and who (or the principle which)
has invented it. Chatman is simply offering his own terminological screen to
replace those of Booth and Genette. Chatman’s use of specific terms™
i interest, center, slant, filter, interest-focus-are really only substitutes for
if
terms that Booth and Genette use. They all have the inherent common
'feature that they still attempt to make discrete and distinct that which might
|
not be so, primarily because the reader sets everything in motion. Chatman
tries to argue, for example, that slant may or may not work in conjunction
18
with filter. If it does, he can then distinguish limited filtration from multiple
filtration (149) and so on. How or why these elements work together and
how the dynamics might change over time are questions that are not
addressed.
i
To illustrate the problem, consider the following passage that Chatman
analyzes from Woolf’s Jacob’s Room:
"So of course," wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels
rather deeper in the sand, "there was nothing for it but to
leave."
Slowly welling from the point of her gold nib, pale blue
j ink dissolved the full stop; for there her pen stuck; her eyes
fixed, and tears slowly filled them. The entire bay quivered;
the lighthouse wobbled; and she had the illusion that the mast
of Mr. Connor’s little yacht was bending like a wax candle in
the sun. She winked quickly. Accidents were awful things.
She winked again. The mast was straight; the waves were
regular; the lighthouse was upright; but the blot had spread.
I (Chatman 146-7)
i
, Chatman points to the line, "Accidents were awful things" as a good example
of narrative shift: who’s saying this? Chatman argues that in this passage
w e-as readers-experience several narrative shifts; we move from
jheterodiegetic narration into psycho-narration, that is, into Betty Flanders’
mind; we see the bay and lighthouse quiver as she would, then emerge from
this filter to hear her words. We don’t know if the narrator shares this
sentiment. Chatman rejects the notion that here the distinction between
; story world and discourse world is blurred even though the thought that
accidents are awful may be shared by both narrator and character. I
question, however whether the boundaries that Chatman tries to delineate
are worth locating or even exist. What does it matter that we are able to
pin down the speaker who says "Accidents are awful things"? What does it .
mean if Betty Flanders thinks it or the narrator does, or if the reader is
intended to make the distinction? I would argue that not only is it a
difficult and perhaps impossible task to make that distinction, but it is, in
| many ways, meaningless. However we define this authorial presence or slant
j (Chatman) or focalization (Genette), much is left up to the reader to infer,
}
so much so that the creation of this focalization is in large part the reader’s.
Thus, while Chatman’s goal is to highlight the role of the reader, he fails to
reconceptualize his theory in light of this different emphasis. What in a text,
for example, shapes the construction of this slant for the reader? If it is
I
I
.different for every reader, as Chatman suggests, doesn’t this imply a lack of
I .
stability and render moot the quest for locatability?
The central problem with the positions of all three of these theorists
lies in their attempt to make discrete that which might be better considered
jin the light of its disorder. The principal arguments I have discussed thus
far seem to rest on the assumption that there is some value in regarding the
elements that promote textual meaning as stable (by setting boundaries and
| isolating activities) rather than looking at dynamics and interactions, the
muddiness and blurriness, the kinesis versus the stasis. This type of
narratological identification, I would argue, is locked into a New Critical
20
i
approach to literary discourse that is problematic because other opportunities
'are foreclosed.
One of those "other" opportunities might be to understand how the
interjected sentence from Jacob's Room changes the discourse around it, and
to engage in an analysis of how it is both informed and changed by the
I
reader’s ways of reading. This type of analysis, borrowed from a kind of
i
<
dialogic stylistics, is suggested by Robert Markley in Two-Edg’d Weapons.
Before undertaking this study of style in Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve,
I
l Markley devotes a chapter to an examination of the traditional and non-
traditional ways of looking at style. One of the problems that he finds with
traditional and current stylistics is that many of the methodologies do not
V '
treat language as a living utterance. Essentialist attitudes toward style,
exemplified by those of Leo Spitzer, tend to view style as synonymous with ,
self. The writer confers on the text his own self-conception, which shapes j
the presentation. Linguistic-based stylistics, in contrast, tends to regard texts
as sets of features that produce verifiable and quantifiable outcomes.
Certain adverbial structures, for example, will presumably produce predictable
i
j
effects on a reader, resulting in relatively stable interpretations. Structuralist
I
3
| critics look at literary language as systems of signs or "conventions of
I reading" (12), which, although they may shift from society to society and
I
ideology to ideology, have certain commonalities. All of these theories imply
kinds of stability; these structures are locatable, definable, and static.
21
In place of these types of stylistics, Markley draws upon the work of
Mikhail Bakhtin and calls for a stylistics based on the natural dramatics of
social language (21). Dramatics, Markley argues, is a more appropriate
jconceptual frame than those used in current and traditional methodologies j
because it better typifies what language does. Language, as inherently social, p
i •
i
is always onstage, always engaged in a performance; the speaker performs
'or her listener as well as for herself; the listener performs for the speaker
and for himself. Discourse, because interactive and dynamic, is thus always
embroiled in infinite variation.
It is of questionable utility to go about systematizing, Markley argues,
to look for stable or transcendent meanings. Rather he advocates that critics -
and readers recognize competing meanings and engage in a rhetoric that
|
constantly assesses the relationships, not only between words and systems of
words, but between internal and external. In so doing, readers and critics
then understand better the historicity that inheres in the relationship between
speaker and listener, writer and reader.
i
• Even though literary discourse is not literally onstage, it is inherently :
i
theatrical. Borrowing from Kenneth Burke, to view written discourse as j
I
dramatistic means to conceive of it in terms of action; to engage in J
dramatistic stylistics, readers, theorists, and critics investigate the ways i
discourses relate to one another and motivate each other. All of this occurs j
in the mind of the reader/listener, based on her experience of the world i
22
and of that text. That there may not be a single voice uttering a phrase but
several in conjunction (author, character, narrator, reader) allows not for
,misreadings, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations but for multiple
readings, understandings, and interpretations. Discourse is public
presentation; it produces a chain of effects and, thus, in this sense, it is
theatrical, ever performing.
; As Markley points out, one of the important metaphors in Bakhtin’s
description of a dialogic stylistics is the carnival. Bakhtin writes:
Carnival does not know footlights in the sense that it does not
acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators . . .
Carnival is not a spectacle seen by people; they live in it and
i everyone participates because its very idea embraces all people.
1 (Rabelais and His World, cited in Markley 23)
Markley points out that this notion of carnival is even more important than
theatricality because it underscores the anti-authoritarianism in this type of
! literary investigation. There are no stable hierarchies because the linguistic
and thematic elements are mercurial and changeable, impacted and altered
historically and by competing meanings. Hence, the slant, the implied
I
author, the filter, and the focalization are constantly in a state of flux, and it
is this flux that should be the object of a new narratology, rather than a
systematizing and a locating.
|
i What are the implications for "voice" and how might this, for example,
j
affect a narratological analysis of a novel such as Bodily Harm? First,
without rejecting the types of distinctions that narratologists have developed
in looking for textual persona, we might investigate the possibility of moving
I .
beyond them. We still are engaged in understanding the "who speaks" of a
text, but this understanding might productively take a different course, that
i
is, one which resists a definitive identification of the voice we are hearing,
especially if we are looking for a singular, unitary voice that is explicit and
clear-cut, and which each reader would recognize the same way. We might
!stop trying to locate the "who speaks" in a specific person or presence. What ;
i
I might we look for instead? In Bodily Harm we might analyze how
i
I conceptions of Rennie are affected or changed by the way she is narrated. *
The narration shifts from past tense to future tense; it seems to be Rennie
!
I speaking, it seems to be someone else speaking, it seems to be both. We \ ,
i might investigate the ramifications this has for an understanding of Rennie
i
and her dilemmas.
In addition, the question could become how any conception of Rennie
is affected by a reader’s reading of her, bringing to bear readers’ judgments <
and ideologies. By way of illustration, consider the following passage from
Bodily Harm. Rennie is on a glass-bottomed tourboat motoring around off
St. Antoine:
I
In front of Rennie is a raised ledge bordering an oblong piece
| of glass almost the length of the boat. Rennie leans forward
i and rests her arms on it. Nothing but greyish foam is visible
j through the glass. She’s doing this, she reminds herself, so she
can write about how much fun it is. At first you may think
you could get the same effect for a lot less money by putting a
little Tide in your Jacuzzi. But wait.
Rennie waits, but the boat stops. They’re quite far out.
(Italics Atwood, 88)
Traditional narratology would seek to distinguish the voice of Rennie from
that of the narrator as well as from that of the implied author, and/or
characterize the slant of the passage. It might also seek to identify that
!
i
voice or point of view that controls the story. An alternative might, instead
of examining the source and methodology of control, investigate the forces
| that inhibit control: the competing discourses and performances, and the
i
I
j carnivalesque where performer and performance merge. The italicized
i :
section contrasts with the non-italicized; it is telling the reader that "this
sentence is different." But the question should not be whose voice this is, ,
but rather how it competes with what precedes it and what follows it, and \
why it competes. The passage could be sarcastic, ironic; it could be what
!
Rennie imagines she will write about the boating excursion in a travel
j
article. There is also a competing ideology; commercialism is introduced,
I connections are made between Tide (a detergent) and the sea which might
I
invoke pollution as well as cleanliness, while at the same time pairing
artificiality with naturalness, man-made power with the power of nature,
J
power with weakness, potentially pitting the first term against the second. In
j addition, the introduction of Tide changes the way a reader might look at
the sea foam splashing on the glass bottom. Tide, Jacuzzi, and Rennie are
the proper nouns in a passage of common norms, conceivably calling up not
25
only associations but disjunctions and discordances: between brand names
and the generic, between a brand of soap and the generalized sea. These
i
terms might eventually combine with other topics such as seasickness, baths,
bubbles that were introduced or discussed in the larger context of the
passage and of the novel itself. Each element, association and action
transforms preexisting and subsequent elements, associations, and actions.
There is also a blurring of activities in the passage; thinking, saying,
writing, doing, doing nothing, and waiting are at some points discrete and at
others convergent. Rennie leans forward, she reminds herself, she thinks,
she writes in her head, she waits. It is not that there is a lack of clarity,
though one could argue that there very well might be; rather there is a
contentious, disharmonious influx of sense. To borrow a term from Bakhtin,
this language is polyglossic or many-tongued. Readers make sense of it but
!in ways particular to their experiences and ways of reading. That each
i
reader would come away from having read a passage with different meanings
j
may indeed elicit the question: Who’s onstage? Who is speaking to whom?
But these questions can only be preliminary. And the responses can only be:
any number of persons and personae. It is a multi-party conversation with
all the concomitant problems of cross-talk, overlapping discourse, and
I
! j
confusions. But because most readers seek to make sense, the passages they
read (e.g. the above passage from Bodily Harm! can become the ground on
which motivations can be investigated, for example, generating an appraisal
26
of the reactive nature of the italicized portion, its effect on the rest of the
passage, why this would have an impact on the writer-reader relationship,
how this changes over time and across cultures.
In the chapters that follow, I will investigate in greater detail the key !
i
issues introduced in this chapter: the creation of textual ethos, the dialogic j
t
t
aspects of language, especially written language, the relationships of author, \
text, and reader, and the problem of voice and presence. My purpose in this
chapter has been twofold. First, in raising the issue of the difficulty in
locating an implied author, I hope to have demonstrated some of the
i
I
problems with any emphasis on voice in narratology: how the voice
i
metaphor can force us into conceptualizations that are limiting and |
characterizations of discourse that are inaccurate. Second, I have used this
i
chapter to question the theoretical basis of a narrative theory that
emphasizes locatability and stability. The following chapters are intended to
elaborate upon these themes and elucidate a theory of voice that rests on a
social, and, hence, in my opinion, more rhetorically-oriented theory of
discourse.
Endnotes
1. The notion of intentionality is a complex and controversial issue. Its |
importance varies according to the literary theory one uses to examine texts j
(for example, structuralist, New Critical, reader-response). See W.K. Wimsatt, j
27
iThe Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (Lexington. KY: UP of
Kentucky, 1954) 3-18 and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
j(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), passim. Although I will treat
intentionality in a later chapter, I assume a Gricean notion of discourse
jwhich says that intentions are social. A speaker says X intending Y with the
junderstanding that the listener knows that by saying X the speaker intended
jY. That both listener and speaker understand Y is in large part socially
determined by a common culture and discourse.
2. The film/book analogy is not quite so simple. See Chatman, Chapter 8 j
and 9, for further discussion. !
3. According to Chatman, interest-focus refers to a narrative effect, much
like point of view, in which a reader’s interest centers around a particular
character. For example, Oliver Twist provides the interest-focus for his !
story. Slant refers to the narrator’s attitudes and "other mental functions
appropriate to the reporting function of discourse" (143). For example, the
slant can be fairly neutral, highly-charged, or somewhere in between. It is
"judgmental commentary." Filter captures "something of the mediating
function of a character’s consciousness— perception, cognition, emotion, I
reverie-as events are experienced from a space within the story world" (144). !
In other words, filter provides the logic behind what elements of the story 1
are presented and what are not.
CHAPTER TWO - The Speaking Voice and Rhetorical Ethos
The system of "hearing (imderstanding)-oneself-speak" through
the phonic substance-which presents itself as the nonexterior,
j nonmundane, therefore nonempirical or noncontingent signifier
-has necessarily dominated the history of the world during an
entire epoch, and has even produced the idea of the world, the
idea of world-origin, that arises from the difference between the
worldly and the non-worldly, the outside and the inside, ideality
and nonideality, universal and nonuniversal, transcendental and
) empirical, etc. (Derrida, Of Grammatologv 7-8)
The nature of voice in written narratives is, as I have shown in the
I
last chapter, very difficult to pin down; who speaks, who governs a text, who j
i
[is the text "about" are all issues that narratologists have sought to elucidate
i
I
with varying degrees of success. As I have suggested, voice in writing is
i
often tied to the notion of presence, and in this chapter I will pursue an \
i examination of this connection from the purview of history of literacy. The
I
! # j
rise of the voice metaphor can be traced to the transition from an oral to a ;
i
literate culture and is marked by shifts in the public understanding of I
I
, presence, authorship, authenticity, and rhetorical authority. Although this
1 ' !
[chapter will not attempt to recount the complete history of these terms and j
1 i
, «
Their uses in rhetorical theories and practices, I will, in citing representative !
i i
[examples from the development of literacy and rhetorical history, show how
! i
, [ the notion of presence (and voice) is rooted in the prevailing status of the ,
v 1
written word. To develop this concept, I will look at Plato, Isocrates, and
Quintilian in the Classical period, ars dictaminis in the medieval period,
29
some consequences of print literacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, and Derrida in the contemporary period.
|
! EARLY WRITING AND CLASSICAL RHETORIC
Many of those who have investigated the uses of early writing agree
that it was not intended to mirror spoken language. Theorists argue about
1 -
its uses, but early writing seems to have been used primarily as an aid to
memory.1 Writing served in such capacities as record-keeping, chronicling
events, and identifying owners, and was a skill that was known only to
, scribes who were specifically trained for this function. Because of their
t
talent for composing and deciphering what would become important religious,
I
economic, and political inscriptions, scribes acquired a unique and revered
status and were accorded a great deal of power within their community.
: Their skill gave them access to what was considered special knowledge,
unavailable to outsiders or "unlettered." That knowledge was locked up in
signs and, because the process of decoding acquired a kind of mystique, the
connection between a sign or symbol and ordinary language, and hence, the
human voice, was even more remote than it might otherwise have been.
The development of the alphabet, wherein each sign or symbol
represents a phoneme, promised to reduce the gap between symbol and
j language or between symbol and voice.2 Alphabetic writing would eventually
i
weaken the power of the scribes because, as a writing system, it was easier
| 30
I
'to learn than the complex systems (hieroglyphs, ideograms, syllabaries) that
^predated it. The alphabet had fewer signs to learn (30 or so in the early
i
alphabets) and was potentially available to everyone in a given society.
By the time of Plato, writing had become more than a useful skill and
an aid to memory; it had become cultural and intellectual issue. Literacy
,and the use of texts was beginning to have certain important consequences
i
j f
for rhetoric, politics, and philosophy, some of the implications of which Plato ■ <
especially was aware. At issue was the ancillary role of writing, for writing ,
i
■was developing into a system that could "stand in" for speech. The fact that
i
| the actual speaker could be absent from the speech scene would cause Plato
to evaluate its role in a civilized world.
Before I examine more fully the intersection of writing and speech in
i
, Greek culture and the issues that Plato raises which will eventually bring
problems of authorship into play, I want to emphasize the nature of
authorship in Greek rhetorical theory, primarily as it manifests itself in the
J rhetorical concept of ethos. Much of what we understand about voice today
1
i
J is rooted in Classical definitions and debates about the pragmatic and ethical 11
i I
dimensions of rhetorical ethos; thus it is worth examining in some detail.
In a culture that is enmeshed in what Walter Ong calls primary
1 orality, that is, with no link to a literate world, the spoken word can
i
conceivably have both a literal and figurative voice. First, the speaker has
an actual voice with inherent vocal qualities and characteristics that are not
J
31
necessarily linked to what the speaker is saying; and, second, the speaker
:has-or creates--a figurative voice, that is, a persona or ethos, that is directly
tied to the rhetorical task at hand. The distinctions between the two are
i
i
;not, however, uncontroversial. One cannot assume that the sense of ethos
that is conveyed to an audience in a speech can be entirely separated from
the actual speaking voice, nor can one undervalue the impact of the actual
and literal presence of the author at the site of the utterance. A "forceful"
orator, for example, especially in the sense we get from Aristotle’s Rhetoric,
not only has a suitable speaking voice, but the wherewithal to manage that
I voice and what he says to convey a commanding and, hence, persuasive
i
! presence.
|
The sophistic contribution to Western concepts of rhetoric and the art
of persuasion was extremely influential. Greek rhetorical theory, especially
I
the Aristotelian art of rhetoric, grew out of this sophistic tradition which
s '
/ j privileges the ability to argue for any position on any given topic. The goal
of sophistic rhetoric is not a quest for truth, because, in the sophistic view,
the truth on any topic that involves human affairs is unknowable. Thus, the
I
emphasis shifts to the available means of persuasion. The ability to fashion
a particular ethos-o n e appropriate to the task of persuading-becomes an
important skill and has very little to do with one’s own preferences,
l
I
proclivities, personality, and most important, authentic beliefs, if these are
i
j even possible to ascertain (an issue I will take up more in depth in a later
! chapter). In fact, the whole notion of sincerity and authenticity is, as Lionel
i
i 'prilling has pointed out, a relatively modem concern, first appearing in the
\
sixteenth century, and was not a significant factor in Classical rhetorical
| theory.3 On the contrary, the individual and idiosyncratic aspects of a person
!
j or personality could potentially interfere in the successful argument; in an
i
important sense, ethos is an artificial creation, fashioned by the speaker for
the occasion. A skillful rhetor needs to be able to use his rhetorical and
personal strengths to "construct” his audience, that is, to make them over the
| way he wants, to mold their understanding into particular point of view. A
rhetor must develop the proficiency to understand the personalities, strengths,
I
; and weaknesses of his hearers in order to accomplish this.
To some extent Plato shares the sophistic view, but with notable
exceptions. First, he believes that truth does exist somewhere, in an ideal
realm, and that through a philosophical question-and-answer engagement on
issues, speakers can arrive at a fleeting grasp of the truth that is already
j inscribed on men’s souls. Through dialectic, engaging issues with like-minded
persons with intelligence and commitment to the pursuit of knowledge,
speakers can find truth. But Plato has grave reservations about the artificial !
i
and fictional component of ethos. He mistrusts rhetoric because it involves
I
posturing-or taking inauthentic positions— and it enables skillful speakers to j
i
persuade others of anything, including what is potentially immoral and
unethical. The fact that skillful rhetoricians can persuade an audience of any
33
position on a given topic— and that this was a source of pride and revenue
for them--is one of the reasons why Plato rejects rhetoric for his republic
and why, in the Phaedrus. Socrates’ own skill as an orator is what upsets him
most. The lesson in the Phaedrus is that a good rhetor potentially has the
ability to move an audience away from the ethical and good. Rhetoric (and
i
poetry, which also has the capacity to influence minds) would be less
dangerous if the speakers (or poets) were good and ethical men and had
only the interests of the Republic at heart and chose subjects accordingly
(this theme runs through the Republic. Books II and III, and the Laws).
I
;But, of course, orators don’t always take a moral position vis-a-vis their
I
' community and therefore can never be universally or unequivocally trusted.
But the Phaedrus has another important lesson that has ramifications
for the discussion of voice and presence, and this lies in Plato’s critique of
writing. Plato distrusts writing for a number of reasons. First, he argues
i
jthat it promotes laziness and forgetfulness; people rely on what is written
down, thereby ceasing to use their memories (Phaedrus 275a); they rely
instead on external marks in place of their own personal and intellectual
i resources. If an individual is to know something truly, he must call upon
those inner resources, seeking the truth that is there, though difficult to
access. In this sense, the pursuit of truth becomes an individual matter,
greatly facilitated, however— and more often than not impossible-without the
I
j help of an interlocutor.
34
i
i
; Plato also makes a significant distinction between the kind of telling
that writing does and the kind of teaching that is possible with speech,
j Writing inherently tells because it doesn’t allow for the student to talk back.
. /
/
As James Gee points out, Plato’s definition of teaching requires that the
student "re-say" (Gee, 1988, 150) what the teacher has said so that the
I teacher knows whether or not her message has been received correctly and
can take steps, if necessary, to set the student straight. Written documents,
including prepared speeches such as Lysias’s speech in the Phaedrus. are
static because already prepared and generally prepared in private, by oneself,
and thus they fail at real teaching because they cannot take stock in any
■ ongoing way of how the argument is received, understood, and believed.
i
;The speaker is absent and has no control over the hearer, who that hearer
i
l
may be, or how the message is presented; the impact is uncertain. Thus
writing, divorced as it is from the initiating presence, that is, the actual
speaker, lacks that responsive and corrective force that, under Plato’s -
| particular epistemology, makes education possible.
I
Plato also argues that writing promotes an attitude in which readers
think they "know" much more than they actually do. They accumulate facts, I
i
details, and opinions that are closed off from discussion and mediation. ^
Socrates tells Phaedrus:
By telling [your disciples] of many things without teaching them
you will make them seem to know much, while for the most
part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom,
35
but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their
| fellows. (275b)
i
To add to the conceit of wisdom, writing also beguiles people into believing
that they have before them something permanent (275d). Written words are
more difficult to erase or correct because of the illusion of stability.
Questioning writing to verify interpretation is problematic because the written
word doesn’t respond, except, as Socrates points out, by "telling you the same
thing forever" (275e) or repeating itself. Readers of a text cannot ask for
i
;more explanation or clarification, and the text cannot talk back to provide
such. The relative permanence of a written document seduces its readers
into feeling that they have acquired knowledge.
„ Finally, Plato worries that the written word can seem as persuasive as
the spoken word. In the Phaedrus. Socrates pretends to be swayed by
t
Lysias’s reading of a speech; then Socrates outdoes him and temporarily
impresses and persuades not-only Lysias but himself. Both create potentially
dangerous situations where readers may think they have read the truth of the
matter, but cannot, or at least do not, question, engage, or test it, for it is of
!
j
little utility to question a text that can only repeat what it has already said. !
; |
j The implication is that readers become lazy thinkers and do not undertake j
the same kind of critical engagement of texts that they do with speakers.
The Platonic critique of writing, as ironic or as controversial as it
!
' seems, coming from a thinker for whom writing is such a central intellectual
36
activity, provides an opportunity to examine the notion of presence in a
world where writing is just beginning to take an important hold. In Plato’s
argument, the speaker (and therefore oral discourse) is of paramount
importance in any discussion of truth. Writing parades itself as being
equivalent to speech, but this, for Plato, is only illusion. Writing is
!
"external"; it may reflect, upon occasion, the internal thoughts of a particular
i
i
person at a particular time, but writing is relatively useless because empty;
writing is devoid of the presence of the speaker, wherein truth apparently
i
. resides. The implication is that writing is external; speech, if not internal, is
nonetheless closer to a spiritual center.
In some ways for Plato, truth, and thus presence, is divine and
| mystical; it is out there in the realm of the ideal, and at the same time
deeply internal, present in men’s souls. Although truth is more often than
not slipping out of human grasp, it should be the ultimate endpoint of
human deliberations. Truth exists in human souls, not in their words,
i
although it is their words, however feeble and imprecise as tools, that
provide an access to that endpoint, that stable "thereness." Writing, in
mimicking stability, gives men the sense that truth may be on the page,
i
within words, and that it is mundane, of this world, and quickly accessible.
t
j In spite of the Platonic objections, the use of writing was increasing,
i
both in the number of texts and readers and in importance. The speech-
writer and rhetorician, Isocrates, who founded his own school in 393 B.C.,
: 37
I
I
i
1 provides a quite different example of the dilemma that this increase in
importance created. For his time, Isocrates takes a fairly unconventional
.look at the role of writing in his teachings of rhetoric by placing a much
"'I
.higher value on textuality. This emphasis may be accounted for, at least in
I
| part, by the fact that although he was an exceptional speech writer, Isocrates
was a very poor public speaker. Whatever the reason, as Susan Miller points
’out in Rescuing the Subject. Isocrates comes much closer than other Greek
rhetors to the rejection of writing as "craft literacy," that is, writing regarded
|as a technical skill supplemental (even ornamental) to a complete education,
[instead, he promotes an expansion of the uses of writing. For example,
i
when called upon to defend himself against a public accusation of being
i
■untrustworthy, Isocrates turns to his own written work and quotes himself to
illustrate his own integrity, the implication being that his personal attributes
are apparent in his writing. His trustworthiness (and therefore authenticity)
j . i
| are plainly demonstrated by the ethos that emanates from his written work.
In his teaching, Isocrates emphasized the visual configuration of
written discourse and opposed it to traditional pedagogies that emphasized
1 oral imitation of oratorical styles, especially of speeches of many of Isocrates’ |
I j
I
contemporaries which he characterized as bombastic and pretentious. What
this suggests is a new emphasis on writing qua writing.
i
I Nonetheless, Miller points out that Isocrates’s work embodies some
glaring paradoxes. While struggling to reconcile oral discourse with written,
38
J
he continued to acknowledge the primacy of speech and to argue that the
I
voice and feelings are lost in writing. In his "Address to Philip," Isocrates
writes:
And yet I do not fail to realize what a great difference there is
in persuasiveness between discourses which are spoken and
those which are to be read, and that all men have assumed that
j the former are delivered on subjects which are important and
urgent, while the latter are delivered on subjects which
I composed for display and personal gain. (Isocrates 1:24-5, also
■ cited in Miller 60)
The importance and urgency essential to persuasive writing are best conveyed
in an actual speech because presence, which is located only in the spoken
i i
'voice, is the critical element. |
i
i
J Miller also notes that Isocrates was extremely self-conscious about
quoting himself in his own speeches, even though he did so with some
regularity. He worried about the sense of authenticity and sincerity he was
conveying to his audience and was clearly grappling with the debate over
i
whether writing could communicate the intensity of energy and personal
power that was available to speakers engaged in truly effective rhetoric. In
other words, he was concerned that writing did not have the presence of
speech, although he did not, out of hand, relegate writing to an entirely
i i
; subsidiary role in rhetorical education. |
I
The privileging of the speaking voice continued to figure importantly j
i
in Roman education, where young men were trained to be effective orators;
j
J oratory was the essential skill for a public person or statesman, and writing
continued to be its handmaiden. Quintilian’s primary goal, for example, in
his Institutio oratoria was to give instruction on the education of the citizen-
orator.
The man who can duly sustain his character as a citizen, who is
qualified for the management of public and private affairs, and
who can govern communities by his counsels, settle them by
| means of laws and improve them by judicial enactments, can >
certainly be nothing else but an orator. (6)
i
Nevertheless, one of the cornerstones of this education was the reading and
! criticism of written texts, because, Quintilian states in his preface, "Nothing is |
j unnecessary to the art of oratory." Whereas Plato argued in favor of the
! audience as hearer versus reader, for Quintilian the orator himself becomes a
I
reader. In fact, written language proved to be quite important in Quintilian’s
I pedagogical theory because it improved oratory in a number of ways. It
increased the student’s exposure to the language used by a variety of authors
and facilitated the study of it, since reading a text— versus listening to a
i i
t speech-afforded the increased time to judge and evaluate, to ascertain the
| !
; text’s meaning and import, and to examine style. Studying written texts also
provided the opportunity to commit them to memory, preserving them for
"imitation" (Book X, 129) in speeches and public discourse.
The value of "exposure" to writing styles and the fact that writing is
used to improve the speaking voice points to a strong internal component.
Somehow, writing helps alter the mind’s orientations and representations,
resulting in improved productive capabilities, one of which is the ability to
40
produce more effective speeches. Effective speeches, for Quintilian, seem to
■
combine the logical precision that edited writing affords as well as the
i
passion and intensity that might be drawn from oral presentational styles.
i
| Interestingly, Quintilian also advocates a procedure that has currency
!
in contemporary composition theory, whereby the student allows her written
| text to "sit" for a short period of time, so that when she returns to the text,
i
she sees it in a new light; it has the air of "being another’s handwork"
(Quintilian 4:2, Book 10). Miller argues that this demonstrates Quintilian’s
assumption that the text can be "the mind’s representation" (70). Miller
I
I
I points out: j
i I
1 I
\
The " I" who wrote becomes "us," through accretions of
! experience. I come back able to converse with, elaborate, and
correct an earlier self whose presence is now in the text; I am
"like another.” Writing creates and re-creates this earlier me.
(70)
Generally, it seems that for Quintilian good writing was persuasive
writing and did not need to be spoken aloud to be effective. In fact, not j
only did writing help speaking, but speaking helped writing, which, departing
from earlier Greek positions (Plato and Isocrates), could clearly be an end in
] itself. For example, Quintilian advocates repeating aloud what writers
1 (especially student writers) have just written:
[F]or besides that by this means what follows is better
connected with what precedes, the ardor of thought, which has
i cooled by the delay of writing, recovers its strength anew, and,
by going again over the ground, acquires new force. (140)
41
I
Significantly, Quintilian believes that the "ardor of thought" can be present in
I
the written word, but it is made possible primarily by stressing a very close
interconnection between oral discourse and written discourse, and using the
one as an aid to the other.
; Finally, there is an interesting (and telling) variance between the old
i
| and the new. Contemporary compositionist Peter Elbow argues that in order
for students to find their own voice in their writing (see also Chapter 7),
they should write quickly, resisting the impulse to edit and ignoring as much
as possible their audience. Quintilian, on the other hand, discourages
i
students from writing rapidly, extemporaneously, dashing off whatever comes
to mind and "yielding to the ardor and impetuosity of their imagination"
^(142). It is better, he argues, to write with care because it will result in
writing that is more solidly connected from the outset, one point following
Ithe next. Revising writing that has been written quickly without much
thought or control is much more difficult. Obviously Quintilian’s motives are
quite different. For him,„.writing is „anjexexcise.for„the> .,mind.
I
j There are several conclusions to be gathered from these examples.
i
First, writing was emerging as an important force, however secondary it still-'''
was to speech and oratory. Although students still practiced their writing on
wax tablets as if this type or mode of discourse was not meant to be
, permanent but rather to lay groundwork, they were also being trained to be
writers. Second, this emphasis on writing was clearly forcing a
reconceptualization of discourse practices. Efforts to energize writing with
the vigor (or ardor) of speech in order to make it "live" with the presence of
:the speaker seems to underlie much of the doctrine of both Isocrates and
Quintilian. By implication, if a writer could imbue his text with his own
"voice," then the transfer of power is complete. With this power and the
, honing of rhetorical skills that the use of written texts could provide, a
i
young man would be equipped with the requisite competencies to enjoy a
certain power over his environment.
1 There are, however, two issues that remain to be questioned more
fully. One is the assumption, dating back to Platonic epistemology and the
existence and location of a stable truth, that presence is located in the
human voice, or that it can be located at all. The other concern is the j
I
I
question of rhetorical ethos and the role a "person" plays in the creation of a
written or spoken persona. The implication I draw from Isocrates and
j Quintilian is that presence is locatable or at least sensible in the human
i i
voice and that this quality can or should be translated into writing. But the
problem remains as to whether or not a text can reveal its author and what
!
'this would require. It is noteworthy that at no point does Quintilian or
! Isocrates encourage students to use a personal voice in their writing; students
copied to learn; they wrote exordia on traditional topics, using styles ;
i |
j
! developed or valued by the great writers and speakers of the period.
Students did not write about themselves, nor did they engage in personal
43
'narratives. In this regard, they had no personal "voice" in their writing, nor
was it desirable.
In the remainder of this chapter and the one following, I will examine
these issues more fully. For the moment, I will consider this notion of
j personal voice in writing in light of two other instances from the history of
literacy that are especially revealing in the ways they extend the preceding
discussion. One, ars dictaminis. or the medieval art of letter-writing will
! serve as an example of a rhetorical practice that was typical of medieval
i literacy and which is representative of the transition period between classical
concerns and the modern age of print literacy. The great change in the
i
i Middle Ages was the acceptance of writing as a substitute for the human
i
voice.
The second instance, the advent of print, was a major event in the
j development of literacy, and, although I do not intend to undertake a
I
| discussion of all its ramifications, print literacy and the concomitant public
J attitudes toward the written word have important repercussions for the voice
I metaphor.
i
ARS DICTAMINIS
In Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. James Murphy points to the forms
of the art of discourse that truly represent that state of medieval rhetoric:
ars praedicandi (the art of preaching), ars grammatica (the art of poetry and
prose), and ars dictaminis (the art of letter writing). Ars praedicandi has
some similarity to Classical rhetoric in its examination of writing as an aid to
oral presentation, in this case, as an aid in the giving of sermons. Ars
grammatica looked at grammar, rhythm, and meter. Ars dictaminis dealt
with the growing dependence on letters, contractual agreements,
administrative documents, and treaties in the Middle Ages. This "art of
letter-writing," which was eventually used and accepted by a wide cross-
section of the population, literate and non-literate, is most interesting to look
at for my purposes here because it demonstrates more clearly than the other
arts the problem of the absent interlocutor.
Writing in the Middle Ages was far from being respected as a vehicle
for the transmission of truth. Written contracts were slow to catch on
because the author was absent and could not verify his message nor be held
accountable for its contents. Gradually, by necessity, the use of written
documents and agreements increased and rules for proper contract- and
letter-writing were devised, often based on Classical models. Practitioners
of the art developed complex formats for letter-writing with rules for
greeting, salutation, an account of the problem or issue, argument, conclusion,
and farewell, taking into consideration such elements as the status of writer
vis-a-vis the sender. Letter-writing grew to be extraordinarily formulaic, j
culminating in 1300 with Lawrence of Aquilegia and his Practica sive usus |
I
1
dictaminis. Lawrence devised a system whereby individuals who had no j
45
command of rhetorical theory (and in some instances no knowledge of the
language) could, by merely copying words, devise an appropriate letter or
binding contract. The system required only that the "writer" move from
section to section in a sentence, paragraph or letter, selecting from a list of
possible alternatives in each section. In so doing, the "writer" created, step-
|by-step, a suitable sentence, and ultimately an entire composition, making
(choices along the way that were appropriate to the person to whom the
i
'letter was addressed, taking under consideration his own social station, in
| addition to setting down in writing what he wanted to say in the proper
jformat (salutation, narration, conclusion, etc.). There was no need for (
I invention or arrangement; letter-writing involved moving through a check-list.
Carried to its extrem e-as it was-this development in letter-writing
i
ultimately led to the decline of ars dictaminis. and contributed to the rise of
ars notaria. The task of following the proper formulas and rules in letter- '
!
i writing was entrusted more and more to special clerks, notaries, and other
official record-keepers, especially since a significant portion of the letters
were increasingly legal documents.
This episode in rhetorical history, however, raises important issues !
I ,
i
; about voice in medieval writing and its related problem, that is, the conflict ^
j i
between writing as a rule-governed form which served a social function and j
writing as a manifestation of the individual writer. The relationship between
written word and personal voice was, at best, tenuous. Texts seemed to
I
carry authority by virtue of their adherence to the proper formula. And
although written documents carried weight in and of themselves, it would be
inaccurate to say that a letter, "written" by a person who had very little
rhetorical expertise, composed by chunking together unfamiliar words into
i
Iphrases (that may have been awkward for him to say), could convey any
|sense of that author’s voice, as Isocrates might have hoped it would.
jNonetheless, although the text did not in any way represent that "writer’s"
1
speech, it did carry authority. It was a document that produced results.
i
!
! PRINT LITERACY
I
j The advent of print literacy effected a significant shift in the
expression of voice in writing, primarily because of concomitant social,
political, scientific, and economic currents. Print literacy eventually helped
; bring about two important developments: the increased use of the
!
I vernacular in writing and the growth of the literate population that had
t
expanded to include not only an intellectual elite, but also the burgeoning
middle class. Print helped to expand the volume of written work that was
produced as well as facilitate the dissemination of that work to a significantly
i
i larger population, one that was much more interested in reading texts written
I in the vernacular than in the formal language of scholarly or religious texts.
f
(Latin models, Classical and Neoclassical forms, although still the objects of
l
admiration, ceased to be the sole ideals for literary works.
47
Though the public-ness and political nature of writing remained
important, writing, over the next several hundred years, would increasingly
become a private phenomena. The period after the Restoration in England
is particularly good example. People could not only read in privacy of their
own homes, but writers could compose texts on private topics in a language
not so far removed from the language they used in daily life. The reading
and writing of novels increased. With the emancipation of the press and
abolition of censorship, a large number of journals appeared, the best known
of which was Addison and Steele’s Tatler. started in 1709. The Tatler
contained short, easy-to-read essays on a variety of worldly topics, geared to
appeal to the newly literate middle class.4
Among the most passionately articulated beliefs that writing could be
primarily the emanation of one’s own personal passion and a expression of a
self occurs with Wordsworth and the Romantic period. Nevertheless the
foundations had been laid earlier, supported by the technology of print. This
technology, plus the privileging of the vernacular, produced what was
necessary for a decisive shift away from the traditional role of writing. The
printed word could, it was believed, convey a self; print potentially could
record a truth from the heart, moving and persuading without the presence
of its author by somehow transmitting his voice. Thus, writing and speech
arrive at an intersection wherein speech is still the privileged
48
element, opening the way for voice to become the most prominent metaphor -
to represent this intersection.
ORALITY /LITERACY AND DERRIDA
After the invention of print, the written word acquired a new status,
accommpanied by the conviction that writing can communicate presence. In
this section, I will, using Derrida, examine the notion of presence and
question whether it can be located anywhere, much less in the human voice
or its alter ego, writing.
Any consideration of the speaking "voice" and its translation into
written "voice" is influenced by our perception of interiority and exteriority.
Plato’s epistemology rests on the theory of an ideal truth that is locatable in
human souls, and one that very often has been learned in some other life
(Meno 85c-e). Much of the contemporary discussion about speech and
writing picks up these themes about interiority and exteriority. Walter Ong,
for example, argues at length about the nature of spoken language; the
notion that it is inseparable from consciousness is the basis for his theory
about cognitive differences between literate cultures and cultures of primary
orality. I do not intend here to debate the merits or flaws in Ong’s
arguments, especially regarding his claims about the cognitive differences
between oral and literate cultures. But the oppositions he so clearly defines
49
I
do emerge frequently in studies by language theorists and those involved in j
literacy studies, and influence current usage of the voice metaphor.
I
i
,For Ong, cultures of primary orality are locked into interiority. They
i
I
seem to be unable to engage in the kinds of thinking about their world that
writing enables. Writing, by disengaging a speaker from her "lifeworld," is
| ■
jthe only way a speaker can objectify experience, by being able to view it
I
from the outside, by taking the perspective of an Other.
( In a primary oral culture, where the word has its existence only
in sound, with no reference whatsoever to any visually
perceptible text, and no awareness of even the possibility of
such a text, the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into
human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken
word. (Ong, Orality and Literacy 75)
The "visually perceptible text" enables disengagement rather than
engagement; it makes possible a certain kind of "study" (8-9), in which one
can classify, analyze, and codify and, to some extent, commodify. For Plato,
to study meant to engage in an exercise of the mind, an exchange with
! another: a dialectical conversation. Ong’s definition points to a different
jkind of "study," one in which one can learn rules and methods, such as
learning rhetorical technique by reading Aristotle, or learning how to prepare
one’s income tax by reading an Internal Revenue Service brochure. The
ability to disengage oneself from language also enables textual analysis,
I
making literary criticism possible. Many of the distinctions that Ong makes
between oral and literate cultures rest on two assumptions, the first that
j J
ivoice or language can be separated from the mind and the second, that this !
occurs through writing.
'
Ong bases the argument that "speech is inseparable from our
consciousness" (9) on what Jacques Derrida would call a "phonocentric"
orientation. For Ong, the fact that writing does not have the same proximity
i
to consciousness is what enables different kinds of thinking and
understanding in literate cultures. In contrast, the notion that spoken
language, because it consists of sounds, is more interior to consciousness-in
i
fact inseparable from it-becom es a central concern in the poststructuralist
critique of Derrida. In the pursuit of truth, argues Derrida, Western thought
presumes a point of reference which language can refer to or express. This
point of reference is the logos, the positive term, or what Derrida calls
i "presence," the place where the search for meaning ends. As Plato would
lhave it, it is the form behind the appearance. Traditionally, language, that
is, the live, speaking voice, the phone, was thought to be adequate to making
logos, or ultimate, stable truth, present to the mind. Derrida writes:
Within . . . logos, the original and essential link to the phone
has never been broken . . . As has been more or less implicitly
determined, the essence of the phone would be immediately !
proximate to that which within "thought" as logos relates to
"meaning," produces it, receives it, speaks it, "composes" it. If,
for Aristotle, for example, "spoken words are the symbols of
mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken
words" (D e interpretatione. 1, 16a 3) it is because the voice,
producer of the first symbols, has a relationship of essential and
immediate proximity with the mind. (11)
In the logocentric view, however truth is defined, language, especially spoken
language, can express it because of the "absolute proximity of voice and
jbeing, of voice and meaning of being, of voice and ideality of meaning" (12).
i
iVoice has ultimate interiority, synonymity with the self, wherein, for
I
Descartes as well as Plato, truth is located (in our cogito); spoken language
1 ^
i
not only grows out of this voice, but is the closest thing to being. Hence,
| one could argue that voice is not words. It is more central, more
fundamental. But Derrida sees this logocentric voice as words or discourse,
! while it is the "understanding-hearing" [entendre] of language that is
I
| synonymous with consciousness.
| It is not by chance that the thought of being . . . is manifested
! above all in the voice: in a language of words [mots]. The
| voice is heard (understood)— that undoubtedly is what is called
i conscience-closest to the self as the absolute effacement of the
' signifier: pure auto-affection that necessarily has the form of
| time and which does not borrow from outside of itself, in the
j world or in "reality," any accessory signifier, any substance of
I expression foreign to its own spontaneity. It is the unique
| experience of the signified producing itself spontaneously, from
within the self and nevertheless, as signified concept, in the
element of ideality of universality. (20)
The purity of this emanation of voice is what gives it its sense of presence
jand its standing as what Derrida refers to as a "transcendental signified."
I !
| Writing, because it is a visual translation of spoken language, does not have i
i ■
i the same proximity in the logocentric orientation; it is exterior, outside,
I
though it refers to that which emanates from the interior. Writing is signs of
: 52
I
Derrida argues that the evanescence of the spoken word, the fact
that it is always passing out of existence, partially explains why we accord it
a sense of presence. When I speak, I say words which I perceive to
i
{emanate directly from my own consciousness; these words are gone in a
!
imatter of seconds. As Derrida writes:
| The immediate presence results from the fact that the
! phenomenological "body" of the signifier seems to fade away at
; the very moment it is produced; it seems already to belong to
! the element of ideality . . . This effacement of the sensible
body and its exteriority is for consciousness the very form of
I the immediate presence of the signified. (Speech and
! Phenomena 77)
Because its instantiation is gone, any semblance of "appearance"— any parsing
i
of it into words and sentences, disappears. Hence the illusion (according to
<
Derrida) that we’re not dealing with signifiers, but rather with the pure or
transcendental signified. Writing is not like speech; the relative permanence
i of writing, its physical presence on the page, makes it quite different.
Derrida points out that writing calls forth spoken language through phonic
signs, giving us the further illusion that we can recapture the original
l
meaning, or "pure thought." But
[w]ith the possibility of progress that such an incarnation allows,
there goes the ever growing risk of "forgetting" and loss of
sense. It becomes more and more difficult to reconstitute the
| presence of the act buried under historical sedimentations. The
moment of crisis is always the moment of signs. (81)
The moment of signs-when the word is produced, and this, Derrida argues,
applies both to writing and speech, because they are both instantiations-is
53
when presence is most at risk, for the meaning of a sign is always dependent
upon other signifiers. Furthermore, a sign is always temporal, located in
time and prone to "historical sedimentations," to the ever-shifting orientations
of other signifiers that bear with them other historical significance or
meanings, based on other speakers and other contexts. Signifiers are always
l already loaded, so that even though we have the illusion this presence is 1
| ideal, therefore atemporal, it is not. Pure presence is not available to us and :
khus, even if it exists, it is without usefulness because we cannot know it.
Derrida argues that we can only grasp what he calls "traces," which are
I
I always vanishing as soon as they are instituted.
I 1
This illusion of presence, Derrida argues, comes from an entire period j
in history, beginning with Plato, in which we held to an ideal of truth and to
an opposition between truth and appearance (77). Thinkers have wanted to
I
iget beyond appearance to know that stable truth, or at least to have the
I
(confidence that it exists somewhere, that there is an end to the endless
I
j deferral of reference. Because the idea of presence is so embedded in our
'contemporary Western thinking about the world, our language, and
i
metaphors, it is very difficult to conceptualize other alternatives. "Voice," as
one of those metaphors, is often intended to refer to a rhetorical ethos
i
created by a speaker, which functions in the shaping of his discourse and the
i audience’s response to it. But implicitly "voice" also suggests synonymity to
the speaker’s consciousness. The following questions then arise: First, does
what a speaker says reflect what lies in her consciousness? Second, does she !
'communicate what she intends to communicate and only that? There
i
'appear to be two (though not necessarily separate) acts here. One is
I
thinking, one is speaking. And they are not necessarily the same. |
The disparity between consciousness (as individual) and communication
](as social) has preoccupied theorists from a variety of disciplines. Speech-
act theorists like Austin and Searle have already looked at the realm of
communication beyond propositional discourse, at what is known as |
! pragmatics.5 They have shown that what is implied in a sentence can alter
l
and even contradict its propositional content. Sociolinguists and
anthropologists have looked at affect and the framing of stance in shaping
i the perlocutionary effect of discourse, that is, the effect of the discourse on
! a hearer.6 In the next chapter, I will examine the nature of language from a
social perspective, which I believe is a natural consequence of Derrida’s j
theories on presence. This chapter has essentially been an exploration of the
problem of presence in writing. Chapter 3 will, in a sense, "socialize" the
j concepts of discourse upon which the various rhetorical events I have
discussed are based, with the goal of providing an alternative to
^conceptualizations wherein voice is a fitting metaphor. I will then explore
! !
I the subsequent ramifications for the establishment of a rhetorical ethos in
!
writing, calling into question the role that authenticity plays in that creation.
55
I will also begin the crucial investigation of the hearer’s (and reader’s) role
I
in the creation of that ethos.
Endnotes
1. There has been a great deal of study about the origins of writing. An
article in the Los Angeles Times announced that archaeologist Denise
Schmandt-Besserat recently presented evidence that the use of tokens in
accounting directly led to the development of writing (Los Angeles Times.
March 18, 1991, p. B7). For other, more detailed accounts, see John
Oxenham, Literacy: Writing. Reading and Social Organization (London: '
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980) 19-57; Insup Taylor and M. Martin Taylor,
The Psychology of Reading (San Diego: Academic, 1983) 17-120; Walter Ong,
Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982) 78-138; Carl F. Kaestle, "The
History of Literacy and the History of Readers," Perspectives on Literacy.
Eds. Eugene R. Kintgen, Barry M. Kroll & Mike Rose (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1988) 95-126; and David Olson, "From Utterance to
Text: The Bias of Language in Speech and Writing," Perspectives on Literacy.
175-189.
2. For a more detailed analysis of the impact of alphabetic writing, see the
influential and controversial article by J. Goody and I. Watt, "The
Consequences of Literacy," Comparative Studies in Society and History 5
(1962-3) 304-345 and Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy 85-93.
3. For more on the rise of authenticity and sincerity as issues, see Lionel
Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1973) 12- ;
25 and passim. See also Marshall Berman, The Politics of Authenticity:
Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (New York:
Atheneum, 1972).
4. There are a number of very good accounts of results of print literacy and
the concomitant rise of the middle class. To list only a few: Jay Barrett
Botsford, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Octagon
Books, 1965); Alexandre Beljame, Men of Letters and the English Public in
the Eighteenth Century (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1948);
Mortimer Chambers et al, The Western Experience Since 1600 (New York: ,
Knopf, 1983); Robert Adams, The Land and Literature of England: A
56
Historical Account (New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1983); Maurice
lAshley, England in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Penguin, 1952).
I
1 5 . See Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983)
for a thorough discussion of pragmatics as well as the classic texts by Austin
and Searle including but not limited to J.L. Austin, How To D o Things with
Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962) and J.R. Searle, Speech Acts
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969),
6. For affect, see Elinor Ochs, Culture and Language Development:
Language Acquisition and Language Socialization in a Samoan Village
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988) 145-188. For stance, see Edward
Finegan and Douglas Biber, "Styles of Stance in English: Lexical and
Syntactic Marking of Epistemology and Attitude" Text, to appear.
! 57
i
CH APTER TH R EE - Toward a Social D efin ition o f V oice
i
i
PERSONA AND THE INDIVIDUAL VOICE
When Toby Fulwiler writes of his quest to find his own voice in his
i ■
writing, he defines "voice" as "some identifying tone or timbre that makes us
.conscious of the author’s presence, that lets us hear the person behind the
jsentences" (214). Not only is this explanation representative of what we
| have come to expect with the voice metaphor in composition and literary
theory, but it provides a useful point of departure for examining what it
means to create an identity as an author.
i
j The notion that an author can be present in his discourse in such a
i
I
jway as to be recognized requires considerable scrutiny. Can a "person" be
i'recognized on the basis of a "tone" or "timbre" (both voicing metaphors); if
so, what do we recognize? Is this self a fixed entity, or is the self a
■rhetorical projection, often referred to as "persona"? What does it mean to
jbe a "person" or, on the other hand, a "writing-person" or "speaking-person,"
I
jand are they different? Foucault raises a more fundamental question in the
I
last paragraph of "What is an Author?" (Language. Counter-Memory.
I Practice). Regarding the enterprise to understand who and what an author
[is, he asks, "Does it matter?"
i
i As I indicated in the last chapter, spoken language can reveal its
i author in a way that writing cannot. We can locate the source of the sound;
58
the physicality of voice identifies the speaker. A listener can identify not
|only who is speaking but a great many other attributes of that speaker which
I
influence the meaning of the speech exchange (the speaker’s fluency, mood,
f
lemphasis, age, gender, health, sobriety, etc.). But writing is much more
problematic because the author, as a physical presence, is separated from her
{text; she is absent from the reading scene.
J The underlying assumption of Fulwiler’s examination is that language
i
’ is a social act in only limited ways, that ultimately the individual can be
{isolated from the social uses of language, and that this enables the
t
i
identification of a particular voice. But even as Fulwiler examines the |
|
different genres in which he writes, he recognizes that his writing persona is, ;
| at least in some respects, dependent upon a specific writing context to inform !
! its character. The voice in his journals differs from his academic, published j
discourse, which is quite unlike his voice in creative writing. He admits that
"[i]f there is such a thing as an authentic voice, it is protean and shifty"
(218), adaptable to new situations and demands. H e also acknowledges the
j degree to which his voice is influenced by the different communities in which
i
he writes. Nevertheless, he insists that he can recognize in much of his
writing, especially the writing he values, an identifiable writing voice, and it
I
I is distinct from the voices of others. H e points out-and this assumption j
I |
I seems to permeate composition theory, especially in the work of Peter j
!
Elbow, as well as other fields such as creative writing--that writers should be
^encouraged to seek out and develop the voice that is "authentically" their
own (216). In much the same way, literary critics often seek to identify that
\
i
"voice" that is Shakespeare’s or Hemingway’s; this quest assumes not only
that the Hemingway persona is distinct from that of another writer but also
that there is an importance in making that distinction.
Although it may be worthwhile to evaluate how much impact we, as
| separate and unique individuals, have on the language we use, too much j
i
emphasis seems to have been placed on the power authors have to imbue |
i
their texts with their personal and idiosyncratic selves (the reasons for which
I will discuss in Chapter 7). In searching for the "who" of a text, for a
I
I
i definition of textual persona, it may be more productive to seek out the
i multiple points of view that are manifested in a text and the multiple j
discourses that are invoked in the unraveling of a theme or plot or j
i
; t
j perspective. At the heart of my proposal is the assumption that discourse is j
i
!
perforce a social activity. Authors are not only shaped by the language(s)
they use and the language communities of which they are members, but they j
t
are also in turn players in the game. They are part of the dialogue; they :
ihave some power to select and choose and thus have power to shape that
! dialogue, but their choices are in turn influenced and governed by the social
I
and linguistic history of authors and their environments. Hence, the ability
of an author to create his own ethos is always limited, in fact much more so
than theories of voice such as Fulwiler’s would suggest.
60 i
i
Foucault may have located part of the reason for this infatuation with
"voice." One of his tasks in The Archaeology of Knowledge is to attempt to
reduce our preoccupation with the author or the speaking subject. The
problem, he writes, is as follows:
[People find] it difficult enough to recognize that their history,
their economics, their social practices, the language (langue) that
they speak, the mythology of their ancestors, even the stories
that they were told in their childhood, are governed by rules i
that are not all given to their consciousness; they can hardly j
agree to being dispossessed in addition of that discourse in j
which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly
I what they think, believe, or imagine; they prefer to deny that
discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by
i analyzable rales and transformations, rather than be deprived of
I that tender, consoling certainty of being able to change, if not
| the world, if not life, at least their ’meaning’, simply with a
I fresh word that can come only from themselves, and remain for !
| ever close to the source. (210-11) j
I i
; While we may find comfort in the belief that we can express our personhood
iin the language we use and cherish the thought that words and the ways we
!
| fashion them into language come from our selves and mean something, we
i
I
may nevertheless be deceiving ourselves into believing that we have ultimate (
power to alter language and life as individuals. Notice that I say "express
,our personhood" and not "express a persona." The distinction is crucial; I am
jnot attempting to dismantle the notion of ethos, but merely to argue against
!a conception of an ethos that is attached to an always recognizable, more-or-
i
.less constant Self.
! Before I go further, some distinctions need to be made between
(rhetorical persona and the individual voice. In "Persons, Personae, and
Ghost Writing," George Yoos points out that the rhetorical creation of a
persona contains an important element of fiction. An author creates a
'"persona" or an ethos for a specific occasion, just as a speaker engages in
i
irole-playing in the determination of the type of face or front he wants to
present to an audience.1 A "person" on the other hand, Yoos argues, is a
collection of traits, attitudes and dispositions that is the force behind the
presentational self, or persona. It is Yoos’s contention that this "person
hood," or one’s status as a person, is a product of one’s rhetorical power.
i
Personhood is a status conferred by the community of which we are
'members:
i
As persons we are in part and sometimes wholly identified with
corporations, parties, clans, clubs, foundations, families, and
factions. Our voices and our personae are fragmented and
j divided by these loyalties and identifications. (29)
Thus, a person is, in large part, a rhetorical creation, that is, the style and
accumulation of roles he plays or is forced to play and how his community
i
perceives him via these roles. Although a person may or may not be a
stable entity, the point is moot, for he is identified by rhetorical positions,
and these are neither fixed nor necessarily consistent. By this argument, it
i
, would be difficult to maintain that a person, through some identifying tone
or timbre, can be "heard" behind his words, for his words are part of the
presentational, role-playing self that is created for occasions and communities.
There is, then, a Shakespeare person and a Shakespearean persona.
The person may have existed, but it is, for the most part, the persona that
interests literary critics. The Shakespeare persona handles themes in a
| certain way, with a particular style. The languages he uses are present j
i
around him in his world; he, as the writer, makes selections and
combinations. But this persona is not a constant entity; rather, it is a
phenomenon that is always unravelling, created and recreated as each play
unfolds. The audience of a Shakespearean performance and the readers of a >
j Shakespeare play have a critical role in creating persona. Sophisticated
t
readers have certain expectations when reading Hamlet that they don’t when
they read Marlowe’s Tamburlaine. Furthermore, as Shakespeare develops in
;time in his period, the discourses in his society change as well as the ways in
I
1
[which he uses them, thus altering this persona. In other words, the
Shakespearean persona is a rhetorical fiction, not in the sense that it doesn’t
exist, but in the sense that is created and recreated at different levels.
This argument may force a redefinition as to what it means to be a . i
literary talent, especially if we view talent as bound to personal genius.
Literary genius may have something to do with the ability or proclivity to set
down on paper what is present in discourses of the community within which
a writer writes. If so, this would necessarily include social and ideological
63
i
concerns and constructs of that period, and it certainly can only be
considered in light of one’s linguistic surroundings and the interplay between
■speaker and audience.
!
INDIVIDUAL VOICES AND VYGOTSKY
| The work done in language development, especially that by Jean
Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, may provide some insight into the problematic
; i
jrelation of self and persona. Piaget argued that important stages in cognitive j
i :
I development, such as the transition from sensorimotor to representational !
i
intelligence, occur without the involvement of language. Language is only
|
one form of representational intelligence and makes no qualitative
contribution to the development of thought. This argument would further a
I
theory of individual cognition that is independent of linguistic-and thereby
i
I social— mediation. |
i
In Thinking and Speech. Vygotsky takes Piaget to task for failing to
I give sufficient consideration to the social nature of speech in the linguistic
and cognitive development of the child. Vygotsky argues that although
| language and thought have their own identities, once they converge in the
! development of a child, there is a qualitative change, not merely in a child’s |
| cognition, but in her language as well. Piaget argued that in the latter stages
I
iof what he calls the sensorimotor development (age 18-24 months), children
I typically begin to use language; they learn that words refer to objects, that
64 !
(
I
words are symbols. The child develops egocentric speech, the character of
iwhich is determined by the fact that she is not yet capable of taking the
! point of view of the other. Egocentric speech, Piaget felt, was the
i
^verbalization of the child’s thought. Vygotsky, on the other hand, argued
!that even this beginning speech has a social element. He developed
experiments with children who were at what Piaget thought to be the |
sensorimotor stage, a stage in which where children were supposedly only j
i
jusing speech for themselves (verbalizing their thoughts). When the child’s
i
jaudience is removed, Vygotsky found, the child stops talking. Vygotsky
jconcluded that even in its earliest stages, a child’s speech is social as she
j
communicates with persons around her: parents, siblings, etc. Gradually,
|
that social speech becomes internalized into what Vygotsky calls "inner
speech." Vygotsky felt that Piaget’s "egocentric speech" was really a stage of
development where the social speech was becoming internalized, where the
j child was beginning to use language in thought. At this stage, the child
I
begins to use language for herself, and the purpose is self-regulatory as the
child takes over the linguistic role that the adult previously held. The
i
process continues until inner speech becomes quite different from external I
«
speech.
I
f
: The shift from the early stages of outer, social speech to inner speech
i
is significant. Vygotsky writes:
65
If we compare the early development of speech and intellect
with the development of inner speech and verbal thought, we
! must conclude that the later stage is not a simple continuation
of the earlier. The nature of the development itself changes,
from biological to sociohistorical. Verbal thought is not an
innate, natural form of behavior, but is determined by a
historical-cultural process and has specific properties and laws
that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and
speech. (Thought and Language 94)
Cultural development, then, occurs on two planes, first the social plane (with ^
'others), and then the psychological plane (within the child). Although the
i
jtwo are separate, the one necessarily influences, in fact profoundly changes, |
the other. Ultimately, inner speech becomes quite different from the speech j
produced for others. !
! !
In Thought and Language. Vygotsky describes some of the principal
'characteristics of inner speech:
1. Abbreviation. A great deal of information is omitted.
2. Peculiar syntax. The syntax is disconnected, incomplete, or
simplified.
3. Emphasis on word sense. The sense of a word is more important
i
! than the meaning. The meaning of words are related to psychological
■ events, and hence, the speaker’s understanding of a word is more important
! ]
i
• than its referential meaning.
f
!
; 4. Agglutination. Existing words are merged to create new words and
l !
word-compounds.
5. Influence of context. There is an influx of "sense." The sense of
a word is influenced by all the other words in the context. Words are
imbued with new meaning resulting from psychological and emotive input
j (245-249).
I i
6. Predicate-heavy. That is, the subject of a sentence and all words
connected to it are omitted (236). This occurs in external speech in two
I
(instances. The first is when the context provides much of the unspoken
i
information such as the example Vygotsky gives of two people waiting for an
\
| approaching bus. They need not refer to the bus; it is in sight. The second
i
i
|is when the speaker is responding to a question as in:
Speaker A: Where is your little brother?
; Speaker B: Playing hockey in the alley.
, Inner speech has the same quality as the speech of Speaker B.
!
' Many of these characteristics imply a strong dialectical dynamic not
,only between a speaker and a potential audience but between speaker and
environment. They also suggest the important influence that words,
associations, and emotions have on other words. In inner speech, the
speaker is reshaping language as much as language is reshaping her; the
enterprise is highly cooperative.
i
I If we accept Vygotsky’s argument, then one of the central dichotomies
j implied earlier, that of internal as "mine" and external as "social," is called
i
j into question, at least in cognitive development. The notion of the internal
| 67
;as thought and the external as language can no longer be viewed as
polarized; rather as the distinctions become less clear, a different way of . j
i !
I !
'thinking about language and thought emerges, one where interaction and the |
capacity for mutual transformation are significant features.
Vygotsky’s argument provides a basis for the claim that the
speaking/writing person is socially mediated on a fundamental level. As
<
isuch, the speaking/writing person is "protean" and "shifty" because the nature ;
j
of human interaction and language is not static. It is ongoing and always j
changing as contexts, speakers, and listeners change. That we have the
i
'ability to use different language variations in different contexts, or that we
have the ability to choose to keep our own counsel, or to hold internal
! conversations as we weigh difficult decisions or sort out problems all,
i
[ultimately, grow out of this interaction between the individual and the social.
J I
I From this moment, neither language nor thought can be purely the result of !
I 1 '
an ego in isolation, even when we appear to be in charge of our own \
i
consciousness and thought.
BAKHTIN AND VOICES IN DIALOGUE
Much of the work done by Vygotsky in language acquisition and |
! • *
| cognitive development reverberates in the perspectives of M.M. Bakhtin. An I
i I
i r
(examination of some of Bakhtin’s arguments may provide further insight on
i
I the problem of social and personal discourses. There are three points I
would like to examine more closely through Bakhtin. First is the dialogic
nature of discourse which, Bakhtin argues, functions at multiple levels.
!
I
[Second is the nature of this dialogue which Bakhtin views as a conflictual or
contentious interaction between words or, more precisely, between discourses.
And third is the relationship between the writer’s or speaker’s ethos or
persona and the discourses that persona produces.
i
1
Bakhtin posits two opposing forces in his theory of language. The
i
■first, and the weaker of the two, is the notion of a fixed and unitary
language that exists only in essence but which provides a basis from which to
[
| resist what Bakhtin calls the "realities of heteroglossia" (Dialogic Imagination
i
271). This weaker force is similar to what Roland Barthes has referred to as
i
j "degree zero of writing" (Writing Degree Zero) and what Paul Ricoeur has
jcalled "rhetoric degree zero" (Rule of Metaphor 138-143); this is neutral
language, which, of course, is implied or virtual because there is no such
thing as neutral language. Rhetoric degree zero is non-figurative, "silent" )
language that is necessary to conceptualize in order to have figurative
language, for figurative language must deviate from some base in order to be
j in contrast.
I
The force opposing that of a base or fixed language is the activity of i
!
! what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia. This is the stronger force, and it is the
!
i
force of shifting identities and allegiances that occur when speakers use
! language. Bakhtin’s central argument in The Dialogic Imagination is that all
69
t
jdiscourse operates dialogically. Each word, each phrase interacts with,
changes and is changed by the other words, phrases, and discourses that it
encounters, whether in speech or in writing. Words alter and are altered by
surrounding words in a sentence as well as shifting in meaning over time and !
I
[context, or historically (cf. Derrida’s "historical sedimentation" in Chapter 2).
1
Not only does an essay writer, for example, alter the meaning of every other
word in a sentence when he adds a word to the sentence, but because that
j sentence is changed, so is the meaning of his paragraph and, hence, his
I
entire essay. Furthermore, that essay will have a much different meaning
1 according to the context in which it is read, and this includes the time
I period. An essay by Francis Bacon cannot but have a different message for
I
J modern readers than it had for readers of Bacon’s own epoch.
i
Words-and by this Bakhtin means discourses-operate more dialogically
t
today than ever before, because the modern world is polyglossic. There are !
[no longer national languages that are shielded from outside, alien influences,
I uncontaminated by other dialects or tongues. The languages used in
! contemporary society are constantly fueled by foreign words, concepts,
i discourses. The result is that English speakers, for example, are truly
polyglot even when they insist they speak only one language. In fact,
! i
i English has almost always borrowed heavily from other languages; for j
I i
example, the Middle English lexicon contains more than 10,000 words taken
from French. Today, especially because English is used with such frequency
70
internationally, it remains in a greater state of flux perhaps than most :
languages, although every language is perpetually changing and evolving.
: Every living language is inherently mutable.
The speakers of any language are also familiar with a variety of
different speech genres. We use different registers, for example, in the
i
following activities: writing an academic paper, speaking to colleagues,
: writing a letter to a close friend, speaking with close friends. We may know
some words in French; we are familiar with "doctorese" or "baby talk"
registers; we may know how to talk "baseball." In each of these situations, 1
we not only borrow words, phrases, and discourses from other genres-an
i :
i academic paper may be peppered with French, a conversation with a friend :
may borrow from "baseballese" for its metaphors-but we also quote directly
and indirectly; we appropriate the discourses of other people, friends,
! acquaintances, lecturers, television personalities, and film characters as we
talk or write. J
On another level, Bakhtin argues that speakers are perpetually shaping ,
•their discourse for the listener, whether real or imagined. Language is
; i
always rhetorical in the sense that it is always anticipating its audience. All
i
j discourse, he writes, "provokes an answer, anticipates it and structures itself
I in the answer’s direction" (280). That a speaker’s utterances are shaped and
I ’
I
| geared to evoking and dealing with the response from an audience-even the
j unspoken response— corresponds to the interactive connection made by
71
jCIassical rhetoricians between ethos and pathos. This, Bakhtin argues, results
i
in a kind of tension.
t
i
! [A]ny concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it
was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications,
open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an
obscuring mist— or, on the contrary, by the "light" of alien words
that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot
< through with shared thoughts, points of voice, alien values,
judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object,
enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of
alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of
complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from
others, intersects with yet a third group: and all of this may
crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic
i layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire
stylistic profile. (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination. 276)
Bakhtin’s paradigmatic example is conversation. Speakers engaged in
i
I
j conversation shape their utterances to the listener according to a large
number of considerations that fluctuate over time and place, many of them
i
having to do with mood and character, not only of the speaker(s) but of the
setting. A sampling of those considerations that contribute to this tension
might include: 1
! __
1 a) The ambience and context. What one person says to another
I
'person is greatly affected by where the discourse takes place-for example, at
work, at home, at school-and under what circumstances, in what emotional
frame of mind, and so on. The number of different contextual influences, of
i
course, is infinite.
b) The system of shared or unshared values. The words speakers use
shift in meaning according to social and ethical values they think they share
with their interlocutor, or are sure they don’t share. A speaker may also be
uncertain about whether or not any values at all are shared and this, in turn,
*
impacts on what she says or how she says it.
c) Previous associations between interlocutors. This provides a
common history; previous encounters greatly influence the meaning speakers
jgive to what is said or not said. Certain words or phrases may have special
I ;
meaning available only to the interlocutors.
I
d) Personality of the speaker, personality of the listener. For
example, participants may be abrupt, effusive, gregarious, taciturn, etc. The
I personalities of speakers take on different hues dependent upon mood,
I
situation (formal or informal, familiar or strange), or the influences of kinds
of stress, to name but a few of the possible influences. I
!
: In addition, phrases and words have different connotations and i
i
I
j consequences depending upon their locations in the conversation. A "How
[are you?" asks one kind of question in the beginning of a conversation where
jit is a standard conversational opening to which the standard response is
I "Fine." It asks something different in the middle of a conversation where a
I
I speaker may want a much less standardized, more elaborated response. Or,
i
i
if "How are you?" is used as the conversation winds to a close, the
i expression could be conveying a number of messages, among them: ” 1 was
73
wondering how you were feeling emotionally, but don’t give me too long-
winded an answer because I want to wind up this conversation."
Any understanding that we draw from what is said (or written) is for
I
Bakhtin always an active, dynamic process:
i
Understanding comes to fruition only in the response. Under- |
standing and response are dialectically merged and mutually j
condition each other; one is impossible without the other. (282)
Because understanding, then, is always an active, dynamic process, this means
that there can rarely be perfect communication in which a listener
understands what the speaker intends. In the very activity of trying to
understand and to be understood, each interlocutor calls up different word
meanings and associations, stemming from his or her own experience. As
Bakhtin argues, the words used butt up against one another in the form of a
struggle. Understanding is successful when the speaker "breaks through the ;
I ' I
alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance on alien j
I
i
territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background" (282). A dyadic !
conversation is not merely a situation wherein two speakers work at coming
to an understanding, but rather it is the bringing together of a plurality of
speakers whose words the interlocutors have heard and read, spoken or
written, that need to be dealt with, negotiated, used, twisted, and reshaped as
they evolve into understandings.
Understanding in the way that Bakhtin means it is always a plural
phenomenon. Discourses come to us always already imbued with other_______
74
meanings that are supplemental to a particular language act, and the words
used continue to take on new meanings as they are uttered, drawing i
j
connotation from the circumstances (context) of that particular activity. The j
words we speak are not just our own.
If we accept the argument presented thus far, that discourse is
inherently dialogic, we then need to apply this theory more specifically to
written language and "persona." Foucault tackles the problem of authorship
from the perspective of the writer or the writing "ego," and this may provide
a way into the discussion, one that especially takes into consideration the
distinctions between writing and speaking. As I have argued, in the oral ;
speech act, the actual presence of the speaker has an enormous effect on the I
j
creation of his speaking persona. In Foucault’s terms, the "speaking ego" is I
| i
present at the scene. In writing, this is not possible, and this detachment
lontributes persuasively to the argument that the language an individual
speaks or writes is not the language of an individual ego, but of what
Foucault calls a "plurality of egos" ("What is an Author?" 130). Although
I
texts may provide a number of markers that they refer to a singular ego— j
the use of an author’s name on the title page, first person personal pronoun
reference, allusions to the author’s personal world and world knowledge-this
jego is never fixed or situated in one unitary ego. Foucault d tes the example
of the mathematical treatise where the author/ego who sets up the
parameters of a proje c t-giving the reasons for the treatise and any pertinent
background details-is a much different ego from the one who is engaged in
the project and its discussion. This ego, in turn, differs from the one who I
i
sets about evaluating the project and analyzing the results. Foucault writes:
We are not dealing with a system of dependencies where a first
and essential use of the T ' is reduplicated, as a kind of fiction,
by the other two. On the contrary, the "author-function" in
such discourses operates so as to effect the simultaneous
j dispersion of the three egos. (130)
J
By the same token, an author/ego who writes the preface to a book will be !
i
different than that same author/ego who is author of the body of the book.
Furthermore, other "voices," other egos, manifest themselves in the creation
of such genre conventions as chapters and their shape, prologues,
subheadings, indices, etc. One might argue that these particular generic
structures are physical and visual organizational conventions, but they are
related to the concept of voice because they represent the way a persona
emerges on the page. Actual voices, the ones we speak with, are physical
i
and organizational tools also, in the sense that this oral voice helps to
develop the character of the persona through physical qualities of the
speaker and his oral deployment of language (including intonation, inflection,
and stress).
VOICE AN D THE DYNAMICS OF POWER
How, then, is discourse controlled? Is there not an organizing
principle that governs discourses that are intrinsically multiple, dialogic, and
76
mutable? Discourse is rarely looked upon as anarchic or cacophonous, as
he merging of a "plurality of egos" into a text (in the larger sense) might
suggest. In fact, a text is, more often than not, coherent and cohesive, and
conveys meaning of some sort, although precisely what meaning is always
open to multiple interpretations. An utterance, written or oral, gives the
impression of being organized in a unitary fashion to promote or convey a
single point or set of related points. This is what we as listeners and
readers come to expect; it disturbs us when we can’t see the point. Even
conversation, which, because of processing constraints, lacks the kind of
control a written text has (because it can be edited), is rarely characterized
as aimless, meandering chat; there is ultimately a point or series of points
:he speaker wants to convey, whether it be to persuade the listener of some
ongstanding idea, construct a position on the spot, or make personal contact
in order to reinforce a relationship. It is usually the listener’s goal-
consciously or unconsciously--to determine what this point is.
Coherence in texts can be considered in two ways: as something the
writer does and as something the reader does. The first of these involves
discourse management. The dominant persona (also described as the implied
author or the narrating presence in Chapter 1) is usually, but not always, the
narrating voice, the voice that seems to take charge and develop a dominant
j 77
I
jpoint of view and position of authority over other voices. But in light of
Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics, the focus becomes the struggle between
I
discourses, rather than the examination of the sustaining presence. Just as
i
jpresenee is perpetually passing out of existence, so does the control that this
I
| dominant speaker wields over the multiple discourses and personae. Instead
j
'these discourses struggle against hers and threaten to usurp her position over j
i
her text, and often do. The perspective of this controlling speaker is !
' i
I
perpetually undermined by the "other" speakers who are present in the text,
! many of whom she introduces herself. These "other" discourses may consist
of quoted material as well, including the voices of characters in a novel.
i
; This controlling speaker, has, as the initiating writer, potentially the
greatest power, however, because it is she who shapes the discourses of
i others within her text, violating the integrity of those discourses, altering the
way they are read and understood by establishing the context; the character’s
dialogue, the directly and indirectly quoted discourse, the alternate points of
view are all presented on her terms.
A brief glance at two examples of academic prose illustrates how this
management of voices might work. (In Chapter 5, I look at another example !
of prose fiction, which, because it is fictional and introduces fictional
I
characters, presents a quite different problem.) In the first example,
Frederic Jameson, known for his insightful control over difficult material (or
"discourses"), makes some rhetorically astute moves in the opening chapter of
i 7 8
The Political Unconscious. Anthologies such as Hazard Adams’s well-known
i
Critical Theory Since Plato provide a' different sort of example. Even
jthough Adams has assembled the work of particularly strong voices or
powerful personae, he is nonetheless able to establish a persona of his own.
In his first chapter, Jameson manages his text in ways that enable him
;(as dominant speaker) to control his text. In the development of his chapter
theme, that literature is a socially symbolic act, he incorporates long passages
jof quotation to set up his argument. One quotation from Althusser covers I
the space of one and a half pages, and for that time, one could argue that
the dominant perspective becomes that of Althusser, that Jameson allows
Althusser’s discourse at all levels-language, ideas and rhetorical patterns-to
I
supersede his own temporarily. However, the context has been created by
Jameson, so that what he allows Althusser to say is also now Jameson’s,
used— and this applies in the pejorative sense as well— and slanted to the
point Jameson wants to make. However, the discourse in this chapter is not
jail Jameson either; it is double-voiced, to use a Bakhtinian term, and could
i
: conceivably, in the hands of a less skilled writer, move out of his control.
i |
Jameson uses Althusser to make the point he wants, so he gives Althusser
j
ithe floor and of course the credit, as convention dictates, and the temporary 1
[ j
! ownership of the page(s).
I
i On the other hand, Jameson also includes a discussion and quotation
jfrom Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus that he presents as
j 79
i
one example of an alternative to traditional interpretive methods. Since
jJameson himself wants to present his own alternative method of
i
interpretation, he apparently does not want to spend much time allowing
i
Deleuze and Guattari’s "voices" to exert control over his text. In fact, he
I
isummarizes their argument in a footnote (p. 23), in a sense both registering
and dispensing with it, a move that reaffirms his own voice and undermines
; theirs, reducing them in his text. H e cites a great many writers and thinkers,
j
and the degree to which their perspectives and discourses become subsumed
within his own is related to how they are allowed to speak, i.e., how much
I
of the space on the page is given over to their discourses, how much
authority they are granted in the discussion. What Jameson offers here is a
'demonstration of power, the skillful inclusion of other discourses to own
them and use them.
| Anthologies, such as Adams’s well-known anthology of literary theory,
I
Critical Theory Since Plato, provide a different kind of example. Adams’s
volume contains over a hundred entries from critical theorists. H e provides
a general introduction and then introduces each text, summarizing its thesis
i
or key points and including brief information about its author and his or her !
place in history. Through this, it might be argued, we get a sense of Adams’
!own voice, why he made the selections he did-both in terms of the choice
I of writers included and choice of excerpts from their work~and his own
position, proclivities, and style, especially if we consider such elements as the
80
length of excerpt, method of introduction, footnoting, and bibliographic
'entries as elements of style. The impact of this volume is like no other,
jhence, the argument that this volume bears the imprint of a persona, even,
in this case, if it is created editorially. An editor contributes to the "writing"
(in a large sense) of the book.
; Moreover, the discourses that Adams includes specifically threaten one
another, jeopardizing the hegemony that each exerts as it is read or studied
t
or revoiced; the presence of William Blake and Kenneth Burke in the
volume changes the other selections. The ideas each excerpt introduces, the
I
{language that each uses to discuss ideas, the style that characterizes each
!
itext, all shape the general context of the passages on critical theory that are
to follow and those that precede. The fact, for example, that Plato’s Ion is
i
j included and that Plato’s Phaedrus is not, alters the conception of Aristotle’s
I
| Poetics, the next selection; the Poetics is "entangled, shot through with shared
P
thoughts, points of view, alien values, judgments and accents" (Bakhtin, cited
above) that are drawn at least in part from the context.
i
j ^ What emerges here is a sense that what has been traditionally referred
to as voice is more accurately an editorial or managerial persona, not simply
in anthologized texts, but also in texts where we expect to "hear" a writer’s
own voice because she is the one doing the actual writing. If we accept a
P
1
Bakhtinian model of discourse then all texts are, in a sense, "anthologized,"
and the writer is never the "actual writer." Rather, the writer is a textual
81
manager, and what we are in fact encountering is the way that writer
manages or attempts to manage other discourses, which, in turn, struggle with J
one other, each impinging dialogically upon the integrity of the rest. But
only temporarily, and only to a degree.
The second element involved in the structuring of coherence in a text
-and that which puts a theory of managerial persona in jeopardy-is what '
i
readers do with texts. Readers receive textual cues that guide the "revoicing" j
1
of texts, but much of the structuring of persona results from what the reader
jdoes with that script that is the text. How the reader "revoices" or puts into
ihis own voice the text he is reading is dependent on a variety of factors that
are out of the control of both the writer and the textual persona that writer '
creates. i
In Chapter 4, I will examine the role of the reader more fully,
especially from the standpoint of revoicing. Before I leave this chapter,
however, I would like to view a current dilemma in academic writing in
terms of some of the key points I have been making in this chapter in order
to show how these concepts impinge on another: issue: the interconnection
; between voice, identity, and the ownership of discourse.
I
i
i
t
; VOICES A N D PLAGIARISM
f
i
Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bruno Bettelheim have been in the
;news recently (1990, 1991) for what appears to be a thorny problem
r _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
i 82
i
’ centering around the issue of scholarly integrity. Each has been accused of
fusing (or stealing) the writings and ideas of others without proper
acknowledgment. In King’s case, a team of researchers at Stanford
University led by Claybome Carson has been annotating his work and have
discovered that, in his doctoral thesis and other graduate school writings,
King presented the writings of other scholars as his own. Alan Dundes, an j
expert on folklore at the University of California at Berkeley, has accused
i
i
Bruno Bettelheim of the "wholesale borrowing" of "random passages" and
"key ideas" (Los Angeles Times. 1991) in Bettelheim’s 1976 book, The Uses
of Enchantment, a work on the relation of fairy tales to child development.
!In both cases, the repercussions have been extensive. There have been
'threats against the Stanford research team working on King’s work as well as
claims that King’s current reputation and his "dream" have been sullied or
even damaged beyond repair. In Bettelheim’s case, Dundes argues that •
I
Bettelheim’s contribution to psychiatry, child development and, ultimately, j
society, should be seriously reevaluated.
i
I
i The problem of plagiarism is a very sensitive issue, and in cases of
charges against two icons of contemporary society-both influential and
controversial— the accusations have strong political, racial, and ethical
1
overtones that go far beyond problems of misrepresentation. I will not
i
I
attempt to deal with those aspects here, however important they may be.
Instead, I want to examine the issue from the purview of voice and suggest j
!an approach that might shed some light on the nature of how we as readers
and listeners construct public persona.
! In a very important way, these plagiarisms highlight a significant
i
[problem with the voice metaphor. When Martin Luther King speaks, he has
ia (literal) voice, in the sense that his listeners can hear the person they
!
t
know to be King; they can also see him (on television) and readily
understand this person to be an individual with unique personality traits and
vocal characteristics. With his particular use of rising and falling intonation
I
! patterns, for example, King has a characteristic way of communicating
passion and zeal, drawn partly from the tradition of evangelical oratory out
I
of which he comes and partly from his own style. That voice belongs to
someone, a self.
On the other hand, when readers read " I Have a Dream" or "Letter
from Birmingham Jail," that literal voice is absent. King is detached from
| his text, just as any writer is absent from a reader of his writing. Readers
may read that text with a memory of how King sounds when he gives his
speeches or readers may ignore or be ignorant of that literal voice.
What does it mean that a writer is absent from his text? As Plato
has argued, a written text is actually silent; it consists of visual marks on a
page. The actual voice can tell us something about that person (mood,
i
| temperament, personality, disposition, authenticity); a text cannot do this in
{the same way. A written text is voiceless.
t
! ' 84 1
I
While there is a disconnection between the speaking voice and the
itext, I have argued that the text is not devoid of rhetorical persona. Both
,King and Bettelheim are playing roles that are not simply functions of the
words they use, but fundamentally involve the persona that they create for a
particular audience in the particular context in which they are speaking or
^writing. The audience has an enormous role in shaping these persona.
jwhether or not someone plagiarizes and what this means in shaping that
I
persona is determined by our perceptions and attitudes about language, about
ethics, about the nature of the individual and the individual’s relationship to
society, about honesty and authenticity, and what roles these play. For ;
i j
J example, there are acceptable degrees of uncredited borrowing, and these are j
arbitrarily set by a specific discourse community. To a lawyer, if a writer
juses more than a certain percentage of another persons’s writing, that writer
I
!is obliged legally to cite that person and the work or face a lawsuit. In the
■ i
'academic community, failure to properly cite one’s sources is viewed as a
serious infringement of academic integrity, and it is almost always regarded
as highly troublesome, the underlying fear being that we ourselves may be
guilty of crossing that line, or that we may be victims of someone else’s
i
! borrowing.
I
Or, it may not be given much weight at all. Julius E. Heuscher, a
; professor of psychiatry at Stanford, and one of the people from whom
Bettelheim allegedly stole, points out:
85
We all plagiarize. I plagiarize. Many times I am not sure
whether it came out of my brain or if it came from somewhere
else. I’m only happy that I would have influenced Bruno
Bettelheim. I did not always agree with him. But that does
not matter. Poor Bruno Bettelheim. I would not want to
disturb his eternal sleep for this. (Los Angeles Times. 1991,
A28)
For Heuscher, it does not appear to matter if Bettelheim borrowed too
Freely from him; this fact does not diminish Bettelheim’s accomplishments or
contributions; it doesn’t undermine or tarnish Bettelheim’s persona. Heuscher
apparently does not feel that Bettelheim has stolen his voice.
Consider also our views on language and how this shapes our
revoicing. If writing— especially but not limited to creative writing-is
regarded as expressive, as the emanation of an inner self, instantiated in
language, then for someone to appropriate that writing under her own name
D r any name other than the original is tantamount to doing violence to
another’s self, a transgression of unacceptable proportions. By this standard,
even ordinary acts of reading imply a similar violence, because they take
another’s voice (figuratively or literally) and transform it into the readers’.
'See Chapter 4.) If, on the other hand, we view language as inherently
social, where not only meaning but our selves are social constructions, or, to
take a less extreme position, where the individual and the social are in
perpetual struggle and negotiation just as discourses are, then to borrow the
discourse of another is a fact of life; it’s the way discourse works. We, as
individuals, are complexes of multiple voices.________________________________
86
Many non-Westem cultures have a very difficult time understanding
that a person can "own" his discourse. For many Asian students in U.S.
jcomposition classes, for example, proper acknowledgment of the language
i
■ and ideas of others is a very difficult concept to understand, much less
master. For example, these students will occasionally incorporate verbatim
into their own essays the writing prompt given by the instructor for an
assignments and are astonished to discover that it is unacceptable, that they
are supposed to use "their own words." What does it mean to use "one’s
own words"? In Western culture especially, there is a strong connection
between ownership and identity, with the implication that the language one
uses shapes and is shaped by one’s personal identity, creating a conflict
between individual-based and socially-oriented ideologies.
Consider some o f the passages cited in the accusations. The
following, quoted in the Los Angeles Times (12/4/90, View Section) is from
'King’s dissertation:
The third ontological polarity which Tillich discusses is that of
freedom and destiny. Here the description of the basic
ontological structure and its elements reaches both its
fulfillment and its turning point. (Comparison of Conceptions of
Q M 77)
And from Paul Tillich’s work:
The third ontological polarity is that of freedom and destiny, in
which the description of the basic ontological structure and its
elements reaches both its fulfillment and its turning point.
(Systematic Theology. V .l, 182)
In this instance, King is being accused of stealing Tillich’s voice. What
exactly did he steal? H e cites Tillich, so Tillich’s meaning is still credited to
[Tillich, although it’s highly debatable whether one can own meaning. King
!did steal words and phrases, but the passage is fairly easy to alter to make it i
acceptable. First, quotation marks would solve the problem because they
would signal what is King’s and what is Tillich’s. Second, the lexicon and
syntax could be modified. For example:
Freedom and destiny are, for Tillich, the third ontological
polarity. Here the description of the structure, ontologically
speaking, arrives at its culmination as well as a pivotal juncture.
The question becomes: At what point does the passage become acceptable
[and not an example of plagiarism)? What portion of the original wording
[and voice) must be altered to avoid accusation and prosecution? In the
form in which it appears in King’s dissertation, the language, the ideas, and
the wording are framed by the context of King’s. Thus, it could be argued
that, in any case, the meaning of the passage differs from its original usage
?y Tillich; the words undoubtedly signify something different from what
Tillich intended because they are located in a different context.
King has an additional problem in that he is working with the rarified
language of nineteenth-century philosophical prose. Tillich wrote in the
stylized language of a specific tradition which utilized a syntax and lexicon
that could be characterized as low-frequency. The phrases are not as
communally owned as those from the prose of more contemporary writers;
88
had King been working in a different linguistic tradition (or discourse
community) it might have been less hazardous to use Tillich’s work the way
he did. Ironically, should King have updated or contemporized the language
or should he have omitted Tillich altogether from his dissertation, he might
have been reproached for utilizing the discourse of the particular academic
community which not only requires him to write a certain way, but to
include key figures and ideas. Failure to do so might have resulted in
different kinds of accusations, such as that of claiming an originality that he
didn’t deserve.
It is also rather paradoxical and yet telling that Bettelheim’s chief
accuser is Alan Dundes, an expert on folklore. Folklore, of course, comes
from an oral tradition where discourse is treated as if it were communally
owned. Dundes, apparently, applies a standard-and, hence, a way of
reading— to Bettelheim’s writing that would be highly inappropriate for the
folklore tradition. Dundes, thus, inadvertently demonstrates both a
shortsightedness as regards the nature of discourse and the insularity of
discourse communities.
There are undoubtedly a number of complex reasons why Bettelheim
t
and King have been singled out for close examination and critique.
'Plagiarism perpetrated by two icons of contemporary society highlights the
contrast between the apparent individuality of the image (the King image
and the Bettelheim image) and their indebtedness to the world in which they
89
live and work. Obviously, this is a crucial problem in contemporary Western
culture, and one where the lines are very finely drawn. The problem of
plagiarism is a product of the prevailing ideology, and I hope to have shown
that plagiarism should at least be questioned if not reconceptualized,
especially since these types of accusations can have potentially devastating
personal, professional, and political effects. Plagiarism is, as much as
I
anything else, a rhetorical problem and must take into account the social
nature of discourse. The speaking voice is a social construction in which the
listeners and readers play key roles.
Endnotes
1. See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York:
Doubleday, 1959) for a more detailed discussion of "face."
90
•CHAPTER FOUR - Revoicing
Every reproduction, every poetic recitation, every theatrical
performance-however great the performers may be-only
succeeds in communicating a genuine artistic experience of the
work itself if with our inner ear we hear something quite
different from what actually takes place in front of us. The
constituent elements with which we construct the work are not
provided by the reproduction, the presentation, or the theatrical
performance as such, but by the work that has been raised to
ideality in our inner ear. Anyone who knows a poem
particularly well has experienced this. (Gadamer, The
Relevance of the Beautiful. 44)
In the above passage, Hans-Georg Gadamer maintains that the
aesthetic experience of drama and poetic recitation is constructed in the
mner ear of the audience. In this chapter, I would like to extend Gadamer’s
statement in several different directions. First, I will argue for the existence
of the inner ear and, more importantly for my study, for its correlate, the
inner voice as it is involved in reading. Second, I will broaden Gadamer’s
application to include not only "performed" texts (drama and recited poetry) !
but all texts, as I formulate a theory in which the reading of a text parallels
the presentational or performative nature of dramatic or poetic recitation. I
will explore the concept of "revoicing" that I introduced in the last chapter,
first by discussing the concept of the vocal gesture and its ramifications, then
by examining evidence for the material existence of voice as it manifests
itself in reading. I will move from there to a metaphoric definition of
91
revoicing as it helps to understand how readers comprehend and interact
with texts.
t
VOCAL GESTURING
There has been a great deal of study of the sound of language in the
fields of phonetics and phonology, but relatively little examination of how
jcharacteristics of the physical speaking voice influence meaning. As we have
seen, for Classical rhetoricians, oratory, and hence speech, was more
i
prominent as a field of study and inquiry than writing or texts. Voice
quality was one among an array of important elements that marked a good
orator; both Greek and Roman texts about rhetoric pay attention to voice
i
timbre, vocal yclarity (enunciation), pronunciation, and intonation. Quintilian,
as I noted earlier, had high regard for "the living voice," maintaining that "it
jfeeds the mind more nutritiously" than reading (Institutio oratoria 2.28-9).
'For Quintilian, speaking was more lively, more forceful, and in many ways
Lnore interactive than writing. One of the questions I will consider in this
study is: What are the features of voice that translate into "liveliness" or
"forcefulness"?
Concern about the importance of vocal gesturing also comes from the
theatrical arts. In Renaissance texts about acting, especially among English
i
dramatists of the sixteenth century and the Italian tradition of Commedia
dell’ arte, there was a shift away from highly stylized methods of dramatic_____
performance that characterized the classicists and academicians and towards a
more naturalized1 style of acting. Improvisation was an acceptable dramatic
form and dramatists such as Pietro Maria Cecchini and Andrea Perracci
discussed in their writings ways in which actors can use language, voice, and
gesture to convey scenes that were natural while at the same time
entertaining. Recommendations to actors from this period indicate an
^emerging semiology that emphasized connections between emotion to be
conveyed and gesture. In his Dialogues on State Affairs (1556-1565), Leoni
di Somi wrote that "the actor’s movements are of so great importance that
perhaps the power of words is not more than the power of gesture" (48).
Gesture, both physical and vocal, were acknowledged to have the capacity to
convey emotions. Later, in the seventeenth century English theater, Colley
Cibber continued the trend of the Italians, speaking admiringly in Apology
for his Life of actor Thomas Betterton, who possessed such extraordinary
genius that
it shone out in every speech and motion of him . . . [Vjoice,
and person, are such necessary supports of [genius], that, by the
multitude they have been preferred to genius itself . . .
Betterton had a voice of that kind which gave more spirit to
terror than to the softer passions; of more strength than
melody. (107)
Outside the theater, Francis Bacon set in motion a trend that dealt
with perfecting a scientific approach for pronunciation and gesture, resulting '
in works such as John Bulwer’s Chirologia (1644), an illustrated manual of
93
physical gesture for public speakers. In the eighteenth century, John Walker
and Thomas Sheridan wrote dictionaries that were, as Thomas Sloane points
out, designed to provide a guide for the oral delivery of written texts,
demonstrating an increased emphasis on pronunciation and elocution that
would last until rhetoric waned in importance as a field of study in the
nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, the study of the actual physical performance of discourse
has been only a peripheral concern, both in the history of rhetoric and in the
more modern field of language study, that of linguistics. One reason for this
in the field of linguistics may have been the influence of the Saussurian
distinction between langue and parole. Early linguistics (late nineteenth and
early twentieth century), considered itself a "science" of language, and thus
preoccupied itself with langue, or a person’s underlying language system v
bracketed off from the actual speech or parole. The system could be
analyzed according to its structure and systematized according to rule-
governed formulae. This was continued in Noam Chomsky’s influential
competence/performance model which distinguishes competence from
performance. Chomsky has argued that performance is filled with the kinds
of disfluencies and speaker errors that muddy the linguistic output, so that
the language speakers actually use is often a bastardized version of their
language competence. Although this is not rejected by Chomsky as a focus
I 94
of study, more prestige has been accorded to competence and Chomsky’s
form of linguistics.
i
■ i
j In recent years, as sociolinguistics has taken hold as a legitimate field
jof study, a great deal of work has been done that appears more
performance-oriented. William Labov, for example, has looked at
phonological variation in cities such as New York and how it is used to mark
class and gender affiliation. Peter Trudgill examined phonological variables
1
in Norwich, England and traced these variables across social classes. Most of I
these types of studies are used to describe speech communities and they are
! arguably concerned with competence in the sense of social communicative
!
I
competence. Very few studies, however-perhaps because the object of study
I
oscillates toward the unpredictable and highly unstable performance end of
j i
'the competence/performance m odel-have dealt with what might be regarded
j
‘ as secondary language features, such as intonation and loudness as they
operate as performatives and affect meaning. Among the notable exceptions
are Thomas Kochman’s studies of Black English in the inner cities which
treat black prosody and the problems it creates in communication with a
' • I
, white community.2 Most of the previous studies, however, fail to come to i
I
J terms with how these features might affect meaning in oral conversations.
i
I
i Nonetheless, these features do have significant consequences. The fact
!
i that a person "raises his voice" in the sense of speaking angrily or more
95
l oudly than usual may mean a variety of things to a respondent and
depending upon the context, may signal anger, playfulness, moodiness, or a
combination, and thus have important repercussions if misunderstood. It is
undoubtedly true that performance is difficult to study. Nonetheless, there [
must be some regularity or systematicity in order for prosody to be as
meaningful as it is.
Precisely what the "voiced" qualities of language dQ is difficult to
assess, partly because it is not easy to describe in any precise way what is
I
communicated by acoustical variations and the ways in which the words are !
i
voiced. Stress placed on a particular word in a sentence, a clipped syllable,
a pause, rising or falling pitch, all potentially convey meaning. But these
qualities often seem arbitrary and irregular partly because they do not open
i
f
to systematic variation. Furthermore, this vocal gesturing can only rarely be ;
i
translated into writing— through italics, punctuation, etc.— and even then, its ;
i
translation is imprecise. There are a variety of ways, for example, that an !
italicized word can be read or emphasized: as loudness, stress, staccato, and
so on. Literary genres perhaps come closest to describing "voiced" properties
that emanate from intonation, pausing, pitch, etc. because literary writers j
have relatively more freedom in their use of language. For example, literary !
i
dialogue can consist of sentence fragments, one word responses, italicized
words and phrases, phonological spellings (I dunno, you don’t forgit nuth’n)
96
and is often framed by indications as to how a word is said by a character
(angrily, saucily, in a monotone, with a shudder).
One theorist who has looked at vocal gesturing is Dwight Bolinger. In
Intonation and its Parts, he examines pitch, accent, and intonation and their
i
roles in spoken discourse and argues that the intonation patterns we use are j
!
drawn both from the grammatical structure of a language and the emotive
state or directives of a speaker.
Though intonation is indispensable to grammar, the grammatical
functions of intonation are secondary to the emotional ones;
speakers feel differently about what they say and the feelings !
manifest themselves in pitch changes that serve as clues. One j
proof of the emotional rather than the logical nature of
intonation— its symptomatic more than symbolic character-is the
fact that speakers rarely if ever objectify the choice of an
intonation pattern; they do not stop and ask themselves "Which
form would be best here for my purpose?" as they frequently
do in selecting a word or a grammatical construction. Instead,
they identify the feeling they wish to convey, and the intonation
is triggered by it. They may make mistakes and have to correct
themselves--even automatic choices may occasionally be off
target— but the correction will be just as unreflecting as the
original choice. (27)
While I would agree that intonation is stimulated in part by emotion, I would
argue that it is not so unreflecting and prone to error as Bolinger maintains. {
Choices of intonational stress, it would seem, are selected to carry out a
speaker’s intentions. In addition, there are other aspects of context that
influence both emotional and more reasoned choices.
To illustrate the motivations of stress, accent, and intonation and how
this influences meaning, consider the following sentence:
97
The counterattack this time is against the Mexican fruit fly.
Some of the stress is dictated by the grammatical construction. For example,
"this" would in most Cases be accented more than "time." But many of the
other choices of stress, glide, syllable and word accent, vowel quality, and
pitch jump are up to the speaker and her emotional state as well as her
framing of the context and the desired focus. If, for example, "Mexican"
were stressed, a distinction is being made between that kind of fruit fly and
another. "Mexican" becomes a focus. If "fruit fly" were stressed, the speaker
is distinguishing between "fruit fly" and something else Mexican.
Furthermore, what is stressed is often new information. If "counterattack"
were stressed, resulting in a diminishment of "this time" might imply some
special attention to the type or quality of the attack. And these are only a
very limited subset of the intonational possibilities of this sentence.
Boredom, frustration, anger, jubilation may result in quite different
intonational variations of this sentence with only minimal regard for what its
grammatical structure may be calling.
In the following sentence, there are at least six different ways to alter
the pitch jumps:
Is this a problem in human adaptation?
These pitch jumps can be determined by repeating the sentence and altering
the pitch levels of the major words or syllables (with the possible exception
of the article, a). Many theoretical linguists would argue that pitch changes
98
would not alter the propositional content of the sentence. But meaning,
obviously, does not rest with propositional content alone.3 Bolinger points
out that speech is rarely if ever spoken in monotones. "A monotone," he
writes, "is powerless speech; departures from it convey greater or lesser
IMPACT" (74). Speakers use intonation to convey feeling or interest about
the information presented. "Neutral sentences," in which each word has
equal weight in terms of accent and no one word is marked over another,
don’t communicate feeling or interest. Bolinger argues that "a neutral
sentence makes no assumptions about what can be played down because the
hearer is supposed to know it already; everything it says, it tells" (99-100).
If, for example, a speaker says the following sentence aloud, giving each
syllable, insofar as possible, the same accent and pitch, she strips it of any
clue as to the impact or feeling of the speaker:
He was simply following directions.
This, of course, is not the way we speak, nor is it what we expect from
speech. Listeners look for clues as to the emotional intent of the speaker.
The ability to read symptoms, Bolinger argues, is critical to a person’s
survival in the world, helping listeners perceive a speaker’s anger, irony,
double meaning, jokes, sensitivity, and playfulness.
These voicing signs have their counterparts in the animal world as
well, as Gregory Bateson has pointed out in his study of otters at play.
Although otters mimic fighting, they are able to "read" the signs o f __________
99
i
playfulness in this mimicry, such as exaggeration, repetitiveness, and patterns
that are not followed through or completed, and thus the otters can respond
appropriately, or in kind. An error in reading the signs potentially has
serious consequences, potentially resulting in injury or death. Errors in
reading intonational signs in another person’s speech might, analogously,
result in problems for human beings: awkwardness, embarrassment, or
worse. In addition to Kochman’s studies of black prosody, Scollon and
Scollon have also demonstrated the problems that have arisen from cross-
cultural performance differences in communication between Athabascan
Indians and the white community in Alaska.4 i
It is the presentational rather than propositional aspect of language
that informs a theory of vocal gesturing and its role in language. As
Bolinger explains:
Though it has been specialized, symptomatic communication of
this sort [changes in pitch and voice quality] is
PRESENTATIVE rather then REPRESENTATIVE. In this
respect, it differs from those communicative acts whose
meaning-carriers bear no natural relationship to their meanings
-th e distinctive sounds ([t] of time, [1] of lime), the arbitrary
words (why are cats called cat si), and the fossilized
arrangements (Dogs bite cats, Cats bite dogs). Intonation is
EXPRESSIVE, and, to some degree at least, spontaneous. (195)
i
Although this "presentative" aspect of language seems to be a critical part of !
!
each oral message we send and each we receive, its role has been
undervalued, in part because it is emotive, idiosyncratic, and difficult to
systematize.___________________________________________________________________
100
My goal here, however, is not to systematize or to develop a
taxonomy of intonation and its parts, but to marshall evidence for a theory
of discourse that underscores the key role that the vocal gesture plays not
only in spoken language, but in texts, especially as it figures in a reader’s
understanding of texts. Thus far, I have focused my discussion upon spoken
language to set up the importance of intonation. I would now like to turn
to written language to begin an examination o f the ways in which vocal
gesturing might apply. Primarily, I will focus on the activity of reading,
which, it should be clear by now, I view as pivotal to the construction of
meaning in texts and crucial to my critique of the traditional uses of voice.
THE LITERAL VOICE IN READING
Before I begin my discussion o f reading, I would like to briefly point
to a linguistic theory in speech perception which may provide an interesting
analog to the idea of the reader as revoicer. In the 1960’s and early 1970’s,
a number of linguists (Halle and Stevens, 1962; Liberman, Cooper,
Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy, 1967; Stevens, 1960; and Stevens and
House, 1972) proposed a theory that attempted to explain how listeners
process speech. Their motor theory of speech perception argues that
listeners, when they hear speech, model or articulate that speech via an
internal speech synthesizer. In other words, listeners "re-speak" the words
they hear as they hear them as part of their language processing. The_______
101
theory in its strongest version, i.e., that listeners literally use their own
articulatory system to re-say all incoming words and sentences, has largely
been rejected. There appears to be no evidence to support the notion that
in order for listeners to understand what they hear, they must actually
articulate or say the words. It would seem likely, however, that a listener
may know what it would be like to articulate what she hears, and she may
also know what she would have intended had she said it that way.
Historically, readers encountered print in a variety of ways. For
example, in many cases, texts were read aloud to an audience, making
reading was an oral, public event. On the other hand, private reading was
more often than not initially visual.5 Most modern readers encounter print
first by seeing it, analyzing or decoding written words via their sense of sight.
In a way, readers "re-compose" or reconstitute the already composed
language from the chirographic or printed symbols, or, to use a common
metaphor, readers unlock m eaning-however we define meaning-from the
page.
There is considerable evidence that in the process of decoding print,
in giving meaning to the words we read, we literally give "voice" to words.
Children first learn to read aloud and this carries over into subvocalization in
silent reading for more advanced readers. Numerous studies (For a review
of the relevant literature, see Taylor & Taylor, 210-12) have indicated that
102
subvocalization occurs even for fluent readers, especially in the reading of
difficult passages or in reading where there is outside disturbance or
interference. In Working Memory (1986), A. Baddeley discusses studies in
which he found that, even for adult readers, when subvocalization is
prevented by the repetition of nonsense syllables during an act of reading,
comprehension and memory for what is read is greatly impaired.
Researchers such as Baev (1957), Edfelt (1960), Conrad (1972), Faaborg-
Anderson (1958), Hardyck and Petrinovich (1967), McGuigan (1973) and
I
Sokolov (1972) have looked at mental activities using reading as their
primary focus and have been able to measure, using an electromyograph
(EM G), a significant amount of covert articulation, especially as the reading
task increases in difficulty. Williams (1983) also points to evidence that
covert articulation also occurs during writing tasks, the amount of articulation
i
I
I
also increasing with more difficult rhetorical tasks. j
What these studies suggest is that readers may convert what they read j
into an internal representation that is aural, with subvocalization as an !
important component. One could argue, however, that subvocalization is so
minimal in accomplished readers that it has little effect for them. But, in
fact, a variety of studies indicate that an aural component may be an
important and basic step leading to comprehension. Taylor and Taylor point J
to a large number of studies that show the degree to which we seem
sensitive to the phonetic qualities of written words as we read (214-215).
103
"or example, a reader is more likely to recognize misspelled words in a
massage if those words are phonetically incompatible (such as "borst" instead
Lf "burst") than compatible ("hurd" instead of "heard"). Apparently, children
develop a phonological store as they learn to read silently to themselves
(Conrad, 1972) and utilize it to assimilate text. In his studies on the working
memory, which is a revised model of the short term memory, Baddeley
hypothesizes the existence of a mechanism he calls the Articulatory Loop (in
place of phonological storage). This loop works like a closed loop on a tape
recorder. When we process what we read, the Articulatory Loop holds the
information in sequence while a cognitive mechanism that Baddeley calls the
Central Executive organizes the input into meaningful speech sounds, that is,
specific names and words, enabling us to understand a sentence.
In fact, Baddeley believes there are actually two types of phonological
storage systems which he calls the "inner voice" and the "inner ear." In his
1986 studies, he found that though suppression of the articulatory functions
prevents visually-presented items from being phonologically encoded through
| »
the articulation of nonsense syllables or numbers, subjects are still capable of
making judgments about rhyme and homophony on visually presented words.
The inner voice uses the articulatory system and is inoperable if articulation
or subvocalization is prevented, and the inner ear seems to involve acoustic
imaging. ------
104
These studies indicate that sound and phonological processing are !
important parts of the print decoding process. In "Punctuation and Prosody
of Written Language," Wallace Chafe argued that the determination of clause
boundaries relies on our "inner ear." In his study, Chafe looked at the
relationship between what he calls intonation units, that is, spurts of
vocalization that peak and end in a terminal pitch contour, and punctuation
units, textual units that are bounded by punctuation, in the reading of written
passages. H e asked college-age and older adult readers to read a variety of
written passages aloud. H e then measured the length in words of the
intonation units and punctuation units and found that the oral versions were !
i
i
shorter than the written, especially for more academic-style texts. This seems i
i
to correspond to the mean length of intonation units in English which is 5.5 '
i
words (Chafe "Deployment of Consciousness," 1980), a length that apparently
accommodates the limits of our working memory and our processing and
production capacities (including incidentals such as breathing). On the other
hand, when the same readers were asked to repunctuate texts from which all
forms of punctuation had been removed, they were much more accurate in
terms of the original punctuation. Chafe argues that this shows that reading j
!
written discourse aloud seems to conform to speech constraints while |
repunctuating a text seems to call upon some form of auditory imaging. j
One problem with his conclusion is that in repunctuating texts we do
not always call upon auditory imaging to do the job. In fact, we often call
105
I
upon rules of punctuation that have less to do with how a stretch of
discourse sounds when read or spoken aloud than with more-or-less arbitrary
conventions about, say, where a comma is supposed to go in noun strings.
On the other hand, what Chafe presents is very suggestive about our faculty
!
of "giving voice" to a text in order to understand it. Understanding may
very well involve reconstructing texts in a way that not only accesses our j
experience with spoken discourse but uses revoicing as well. Understanding
a written text, it would seem, is not solely a visual phenomenon.
Chafe also points out that some writers draw heavily upon their
i
spoken voices in the production of texts. H e cites a passage by Russell j
| j
Long:
As I write these sentences, even though my lips are not moving,
I am quite conscious of the sound the words I am writing
would make if they were read aloud. (Chafe 405)
and novelist Eudora Welty, who ties her writing voice to her "reading voice":
My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as
they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books.
When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then
I act to make my changes. I have always trusted this voice.
(13)
It is important to note that both Long and Welty are Southerners and come I
out of a tradition that has close connections to oral story-telling. While this |
connection may distinguish them from non-Southern writers, resulting in
stylistic differences between Southern and non-Southern writers, it may also
be that both Long and Welty are simply more conscious of a process that all
106
writers use to some extent, consciously or unconsciously. The composing
voice that Long and Welty refer to is implicitly tied to a reading voice, to
what happens in the process of reading. The composer uses his speaking
voice to write; the reader then "revoices" what she reads. Or, to put it
another way, the first reader, and the first revoicer, of a text is the actual'
writer of that text in the activity of composing.
While it appears likely that revoicing is called upon when writers write
and when readers read, what is the nature of this voice? The concept of
revoicing that I am proposing here entails decoding marks on a page and
transferring them to an aural mode wherein readers give what they read
inflection, intonation and phrasing patterns, pitch, stress, and loudness,
including pauses, according to how readers interpret the physical sign of the
print medium. Punctuation such as commas, question and quotation marks,
periods, and paragraphing serve as guides to supplement the grammatical
patterns of English. But, as with speech, the grammar itself (in this case the
"visual grammar" including punctuation) are not the only components.
Just as intonation is critical to understanding the full message of a
speaker in conversation, revoicing may also be critical to our making any
sense of what we read. The following examples may help illustrate possible
ways in which readers, in moving from text to meaning, depend upon an oral
articulation, cued in part by the text itself.
107
REVOICING PROSE
Ways of revoicing can be demonstrated with both literary and non-
literary prose. Consider a sample from Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay
Gould:
The greatest bit of "field work," as we shall see, occurred in
Washington during the spring o f 1973, when Whittington’s
brilliant and eclectic student Simon Conway Morris made a
systematic search through all the drawers of Walcott’s
specimens, consciously looking for oddities because he had
grasped the germ of the key insight about Burgess disparity.
(80)
In this example, there are words set apart by quotation marks and italics,
commas to mark potential pauses or parentheticals ("as we shall see") and a
sentence-final period, all of which may serve as cues for how the passage
might be revoiced. Some clauses cue rising and falling pitch contours
although readers might tend to break these clauses up when revoiced,
resulting in additional pitch contours that do not correspond to formal clause
jboundaries. In phrasing such as "consciously looking for oddities because he
had grasped the germ of key insight," there is a variety of choices for what
words to stress. The reader in revoicing could stress "consciously" over
"looking," if from the context "consciously" was considered new or important
information; he could accent "-cause" in "because" to emphasize the causal
importance of why Morris might be so diligent about his search; or he could
stress "oddities" to place more weight on the fact that it is just those oddities
that constitute the most important finds. Grammar and punctuation, then,
108
provide some cues to interpretation; readers are left to supply much on their
own based on their experience both with language and with the context,
which in this case includes what the reader has already learned from the
preceding pages of Wonderful Life.
As I suggested earlier in this chapter, literary genres tend to contain
more figurative language than normally appears in academic or scientific
prose, some of which (like alliteration and onomatopoeia) help to link the
visual with the aural. Additionally, in literary language, especially poetry, the j
interplay between written language and spoken language is often encouraged
rather than discouraged. Jane Austen’s Emma, for example, makes use of a
number of revoicing cues that are not atypical of the novel genre. In the
following excerpt, Emma is responding to a comment by her friend and
sometime antagonist, Mr. Knightly.
This [comment] Emma felt was aimed at her; and it
made her quite angry. It was not in compliment to Jane
Fairfax however that he was so indifferent, or so indignant; he
was not guided by her feelings in reprobating the ball, for she
enjoyed the thought of it to an extraordinary degree. It made
her anim ated-open hearted— she voluntarily said;—
"Oh! Miss Woodhouse, I hope nothing may happen to
prevent the ball. What a disappointment it would be! I do
look forward to it, I own, with very great pleasure." (199)
Italics and exclamation marks cue emphasis; commas, dashes, and semi-
!
colons mark pauses; quotation marks signify a change in speaking voice-all
of which affect revoicing. Repetition ("so indifferent, or so indignant") might
serve to accentuate "so" when revoked.
109
The first paragraph of the excerpt is a description of Emma’s
thoughts, what she "feels" or is thinking, rather than objective narrative.
Phis, together with a sense that the reader may have that Emma is angry,
cues a "voicing" of the passage that reflects her anger. To voice a strident,
angry tone, a reader might elevate the pitch on the first syllable of
"compliment" or "Fairfax" or "reprobating" more than if the contextual
indication were for sadness. Still, the reader has a great variety of pitch,
stress, and intonational choices that are left entirely up to him, choices that
are in part linked to his actual speaking voice-how he actually sounds when
he speaks— choices that seem to have been deemed inconsequential by many
language theorists to date, but choices that have ramifications in interpreting
print. In one sense, it is a very personal revoicing because tied to a
personal speaking voice. But it also involves choices that are heavily
influenced by other factors: the text, of course; what the reader already
knows about Emma and her reactions; and the type of character-arrogant,
shy, male, female, love interest, parent-Emma is angry with.
In the same passage, there are a number of ways to revoice individual
words. For example, the revoicing that a reader selects for " ’Oh!”’ would
indicate a particular interpretation. The selection may depend on a reader’s
understanding of context, if the speaker is being sarcastic, for example, or
ironic, or naively ebullient. Again, choices need to be made: Should the
word be revoiced in a drawn-out glide, or quickly, staccato-like or with rising
110
or falling pitch contour? Should it be pronounced loudly or softly, i.e., does
the exclamation mark call for loudness or does it indicate surprise or
curtness? How has Jane Fairfax, the speaker in the second paragraph,
normally responded to Emma or to other characters in the preceding pages? i
Most important, however, is how a particular reader’s personal linguistic
" history militates for certain characteristics in the revoicing. This history
would include a reader’s assessment of how someone "sounds" when angry as
well as the reader’s intonational style in talk to himself or his familiars. It
would also be influenced by the reader’s experience with Emma, the reading
L
of the work in its entirety-not simply a short excerpt-and by the reader’s
I
familiarity with both 19th century novels and literature as a whole. These
influences would affect any future reading of Emma.
I will elaborate more on these last few points in a later section in this
chapter ("Revoicing and Worldmaking"). First, however, I will review some
of the alternative positions regarding the reading process that might conflict
with what I have characterized as revoicing. !
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j
One could argue, for example, that the visual formatting of texts
provides amply for interpretation and that revoicing is, if not irrelevant, at
least a minor influence. For example, reading an italicized word would elicit
a translation of emphasis, and, thus, it is not necessary to vocalize that word
to accomplish that goal. An italicized word need not cue loudness or pitch
i
change in order to make sense and set that word apart from the rest o f the j
I l l
non-italicized text. Visually italicized words stand out; they are different
from the other words. Paragraphing can mark a topic shift visually and
doesn’t need a theory of revoicing to account for this. Furthermore,
competent readers skim quickly over written passages, skipping words and
punctuation, so that revoicing, at best, might be an abbreviated activity. But
revoicing takes place in conjunction with visual imaging; paragraphing would I
|
not have the same effect if we did not understand it on a deeply auditory j
plane. For example, by according to a paragraph break a longer pause or an
intonational shift— both features of revoicing--a reader experiences the kind of j
shift in topic or of perspective or of point of view that paragraphs are often
intended to convey. Even more importantly, while a comma, for example,
cues a break, the choice as to how to revoice that break is up to the reader; |
t
i
■ it is something the reader needs to compute from his sense of the text.
In revoicing, readers make some of the same mistakes that plague oral
discourse. In other words, readers may revoice incorrectly, that is, utilize an
intonation pattern that doesn’t make sense or is inappropriate. This may 1
i
result in confusion or in a failure to apprehend the rhythm of a passage,
particularly important in poetry. At a line break, page break, or due to
ambiguous grammatical structure or punctuation, readers may revoice with a
certain type of pitch contour what they think is a clause, using a falling pitch
before the clause has really ended. Consider the following sentence:
L et’ s continue on having misinterpreted the passage.
112
In this sentence, there are at least two different revoicings of "Let’s continue
on having," one of which stresses "on," inviting a pause after the word and a
clause break, the other have no clause break between "on" and "having."
The revoicings have different meanings, and the second alternative, if read
closely, doesn’t make much sense. In such a case, the reader misreads the
text and has to reread the passage, revoicing it in a way that makes sense.
Chomsky would argue that this is a typical performance error and that we
are misreading the deep structure of the sentence and that our "misvoicing"
jdoes not change that deep structure. While this argument may have some
validity, our "performance" of language so permeates our use of language
and our language competence that it should not be considered merely
peripheral.
The argument could be made that in skimming or speed-reading,
readers could not possibly revoice the passages because they are picking out
only words or word clusters to obtain an abbreviated message of what is on
the page, and thus speed-reading has to be a purely visual operation. It may
be, however, that two possible operations are at work. The first is that
speed-readers revoice (and hear) only fragments and, much as listeners do
when overhearing fragments from a conversation in, say, another room,
speed-readers "fill in the blanks," or reconstruct the missing parts to produce
meaningful sentences. This operation is a very rapid one, so rapid that
speed-readers might not be aware of the complexity of the operation. Or
113
second, it may be that speed-readers don’t use revoicing at all in skimming
or speed reading, that it is somehow iconic reading, like the reading of
numbers. This may be the reason why passages read in this way are more
difficult to remember; access to echoic memory and aural long-term memory
is minimal. Granted speed-readers spend less time with the text, and this
may be one important reason for a weaker memory of the text. But the
issue may actually have more to do with the differences in how we read
when we read more slowly; we visually pick up and are able to articulate or
revoice more of the words. —-----
It also could be argued that readers read texts of high surface
difficulty (e.g., a scientific article) more slowly in order to understand;
revoicing every word may become a necessity. By contrast, texts of low
surface difficulty (e.g. a contemporary novel), because readers can move
through the texts more rapidly, do not require a revoicing of every word. I
would argue, however, that this is more appropriately a question of style.
iHenry James works with a fairly familiar lexicon, but, stylistically, his prose
is constructed in such a way that if the reader does not get the prosody
right, the work (sentence, paragraph, etc.) is incomprehensible. James,
especially in novels such as The Golden Bowl, forces the reader to revoice,
or, in Baddeley’s terms, to make maximum use of the Articulatory Loop, in
order to understand.
REVOICING AN D READING ALO UD
There are some telling differences between revoicing and reading
aloud. In both cases, how a passage is read influences meaning, but the fact
that reading aloud normally includes an audience and is a public activity has
certain consequences.
Reading aloud is not just revoicing. When a reader reads aloud to
another person or to a group (or to an implied person or group), the reader
ihas to attend to a listener other than herself. She is forced to attend more
assiduously to the decoding. As a result, what constitutes a disfluency is
different. In revoicing, disfluencies have to do with misreadings, some of
which go unnoticed and some of which result in a failure to understand what
ds going on in the text. Many of these misreadings are misvoicings, that is,
!they are intonation and stress errors and result in incomprehensible
(sentences. The only critic is the internal critic who may say, "I can’t
understand. It seems important so I have to go back and reread and
revoice." In revoicing, the goal is for the primary listener (who is also the
reader) to understand the text; correctness is not so critical. The reader can
skip words and sentences because often getting the gist of the passage is
sufficient.
In reading aloud, disfluencies have to do with errors in pronunciation,
pausing, channel errors such as coughing, stuttering, fillers to give the reader
time to scan ahead or prepare. Loudness is for the benefit of the listener,
1
115
not the reader-listener so that the audience can hear, literally. Correctness is
more important; there are more critics. Reading aloud is not a private
activity. It is a performance. The reader has to attend to cultural
expectations and cannot rely upon private ways of revoicing which might
include shorthand. For example, the reader cannot skip anything unless she
explains.
Since, in the reading aloud situation, the listeners are getting their
•input through the auditory system alone, the listeners have time to attend to
other things. Part of the work of reading is decoding-the transcribing of
print to words and phrases--and this is done for the listeners.
i
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REVOICING A N D THE HEARING-IMPAIRED
In Language and Deafness. Stephen Quigley and Peter Paul examine
the range of theories that attempt to explain how the deaf learn to read and
compare these to theories of how the non-hearing-impaired read. Some
theorists, notably Frank Smith, believe that reading is primarily a top-down
activity, that is, readers make predictions about what they are reading and
use the text to confirm or disconfirm those predictions. Smith argues that
readers look at a word shape, predict what that word will be and don’t
necessarily rely upon phonetics or phonology in decoding. Bottom-up
reading is decoding individual letters and words and piecing them together in
order to understand the whole; bottom-up reading utilizes phonological
116
translation. [Quigley and Paul argue that good readers use both approaches,
combining both data-driven and conceptually-driven strategies, using both
phonological decoding, visual shape of words, and prediction to read. Good
readers who are hearing-impaired also use both strategies, relying in part on i
phonological codes, a theory which, of course, assumes that these readers
have or have had some access to an aural world. Hearing-impaired readers
who are poor readers use a kind of visual gestalt to process texts; they exist
in a world in which seeing must help compensate for what they cannot hear,
and, naturally "seeing” is primary in their reading of texts. Gaines, Mandler
and Bryant (1981) speculate that their approach is exclusively top-down since
they have no access to phonological storage.
In "Written Language in a Visual World" (1981), J.G. Kyle concurs.
i
jHe argues that the extreme difficulty that prelingually deaf children have in j
'learning to read and write may have something to do with the difficulty in !
accessing their Articulatory Loop (See Baddeley, above). Whether or not the
Articulatory Loop is a useful model for what actually happens in processing
text, the fact that the prelingually deaf do not have the same direct access to
the hearing of physical voices means they do not have "voiced" models;
hence they must learn to read in ways that don’t include the human speaking
voice, and this may result in writing that looks (and sounds in our non-deaf,
revoiced language) much different.
117
The limited access that the hearing-impaired have to an auditory
environment also restricts their world knowledge as well. Because they are
often totally shut off from the oral communication, many deaf readers come
to the activity of reading without the same contextual knowledge as hearing
persons, thus predictions they do make about what they are reading may be
inaccurate. One result is that hearing-impaired readers are often very skillful
at understanding the overall message or gist of a text, but are very poor at
grasping details.
i
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VOICELESSNESS |
The reading of the hearing-impaired provides one example of partially ;
\
I
voiced or voiceless texts. Most readers, both hearing and hear-impaired, j
however, experience voicelessness in reading. One way of looking at
voicelessness is through what Wolfgang Iser calls "gaps." According to Iser
gaps are products of "the fundamental asymmetry between text and reader,
that give rise to communication in the reading process" (The Act of Reading
167). The reader has different goals, plans, and behaviors than the writer
and the text he has produced. These differences create gaps and it is within
these gaps that the reader makes projections, drawing upon her world
knowledge and experience to make sense out of what she reads. Real
communication between text and reader occurs when the text motivates
changes in the reader’s projections, and when the reader gives up some of
118
her original projections to accommodate the text. According to Iser, a text
stimulates the reader to use her store of knowledge to complete a text; as
such, a text is indeterminate because the writer has little or no control over
the reader's response, even though some cues and indications have been
given by the text.
In conversation, silences are temporal spaces where nothing is actually
spoken; but they are empty only of sounds. Silences may be as short as a
micropause, a delay sufficient to communicate hesitation or doubt as in a
pause before responding to a question, or as long as several minutes or
more. Communication, however, takes place as long as the speakers are
present, and conceivably continues in the absence of the speakers, often by
virtue of their absence. If Speaker A is waiting for Speaker B to telephone
and Speaker B does not, the result is a kind of silence in which a great deal
(anger, hostility, indifference, one-upsmanship) may be communicated.
Silences, then, are part of the traditional definition of voice-even though
they are unvoiced— because they contribute to a speaker’s ethos’ , the
communication or style of communication is informed in part by what is
''unvoiced." Ironically, voice, then, includes the unvoiced and often relies
upon the unspoken.
In writing, there is some notable differences. A text is "silent" if no
lone reads it. It "speaks" when readers read (or revoice) it. Readers can
pick up texts and put them down at will and this potentially affects the______
119
nature of the revoicing as they pause to think about what they have read, to J
J
puzzle over or marvel at it. In these cases, readers may be RE-revoicing
jwhat they have read, saying it to themselves again, but in a different way to
Jfacilitate comprehension or to consider alternatives, or as Iser might say, to
examine their own projections of the text. If readers are interrupted, they
may cease to revoice altogether as they are forced to attend to some other
activity. If and when they return to the text, they come to it with an altered
perspective as the context of reading inevitably shifts over time.
In written discourse, silences may have a physical, spatial aspect. j
There are blanks on the page in the form of conventions such as extra
spacing, paragraphing or chapter breaks, which cue pausing in revoicing,
although a pause may or may not occur in the revoicing. Should the reader
pause, as cued by the spacing between chapters of a book, for example, the
text is silent. Alternatively, he may move directly to the next chapter
without a break, much like speakers in a conversation who make topic shifts
without pausing, although topic shifts are usually cued in some way. The
chapter break is the physical marker that designates a new reading
orientation, calling upon the reader’s knowledge of chapter conventions and
asking the reader to make the requisite shift.
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy contains some unusual instances of
utilizing blanks; the novel’s Chapter 18 and 19 in Volume 9 are blank pages.
The text is silent, or at least the idea of silence is invoked, but the text_______
continues to convey meaning, i.e., the blank chapters are meaningful; the
reader fills in the blanks.
Poetry makes even more specialized use of the page in its line spacing
and blocking of the text and individual words. But again the reading is not
a monologic phenomenon. In order for these blanks to be interpreted as
pauses or silences or spaces where there is no sound between blocks of text,
they need to be interpreted as silences, hence the relationship to revoicing.
While it is conceivable that one can read over a block of text
containing spaces, paragraph breaks, and chapter breaks without a pause, the
revoicing invokes those pauses in a kind of mental shorthand. The following
is the poem " i & their son" by e.e. cummings from his book i six
nonlectures:
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked
thee
,has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
they
beauty .how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
I 121
gods
(but
true
j
I to the incomparable
j couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover
thou answerest
; them only with
spring)
It is quite possible that in the revoicing of it— especially if it is read over
rapidly or aloud for an audience-the poem may lose all or part of the effect
iof its spatial design. On the other hand, if the reader construes its spacing
j to be important to the meaning and the impact of the poem, then this may
I
i
I manifest itself in the revoicing, not necessarily in the literal "re-voicing" but
I in the conceptualization of the poem. The reader may understand the
pauses iconically, processing the physical aspect of the blocking and
incorporating that into his understanding of the poem.
REVOICING AN D WORLDMAKING
In my discussion thus far, I have been moving from an exploration of
revoicing at its literal level to revoicing as a metaphor for conceptualizing
i
. how readers understand texts. At this point, I would like to complete the
transition. Although I will take this up in greater detail in Chapter 6, where
122
I
I look at actual readers reading (and revolting) Truman Capote’s The Grass
Harp, here I will begin the examination, making some suggestions as to what
,it might mean metaphorically to R E -voice-or to give voice to words already
I
voiced by another. r
In Ways of Worldmaking. Nelson Goodman argues that there is no
unique real world that exists apart from the order that human beings impose
!upon it, or to put it another way, apart from human symbolic language. !
i
Human beings shape or "make" their environment and, because of this
phenomenon, the actual, "real" forms and patterns of the world around it are
irrelevant because always rewoven into the fabric of human perceptions of
that environment. Goodman writes:
Perceiving motion . . . often consists in producing it.
Discovering laws involves drafting them. Recognizing patterns
is very much a matter of inventing and imposing them.
Comprehension and creation go together. (22)
It is this aspect of creation that goes hand-in-hand with comprehension that I
want to apply to reading. If language imposes a kind of order, then
certainly the ways in which readers revoice texts determine the shapes of
: !
i those texts. In terms of the theory of voicing I am proposing here, the
reader’s voice imposes an order. As I indicated earlier in my discussion of
Emma, the literal voice we may use in reading is tied to a metaphorical
i
, voice, informed by experience in the world, or world knowledge. Readers
123
'have different ways of reading, different genre knowledge, varying expertise,
and an assortment of experiences in and of the world.
Psycholinguists (Bartlett, Rumelhart, Thorndyke, Van Dijk, Kintsch and
I
others) have looked at approaches to stories and narrative prose to try to i
systematize how readers process narratives. One of the results of these
inquiries is schema theory which suggests that readers apply a relatively
organized body of knowledge about an events, abstracted through experiences
I
about those events, to the reading of texts. These schemas guide a reader’s
memory and reconstruction of a text. Because people have different
experiences of events, especially cross-culturally, each person’s schema differs.
In addition, because "events" encompass emotional as well as physical actions,
the quality of experiences is infinitely variable.
While a great deal more can be said about schema theory and textual
processing, the basic argument supports a revoicing concept wherein the
reader’s metaphorical voice has a profound role in structuring meaning
derived from a text. I do not, by any means, wish to imply that texts have
no function. Texts trigger voicings. They provide a map of what Jerome
Bruner calls possible worlds, calling up in a reader’s mind points of
reference, associations, and possible settings with which a reader constructs,
or in Goodman’s terms, "comprehends and creates" the world of the text in
her own mind and with her own voice.
124
As I have mentioned, this notion of voice is operative in the activity
(
of "setting pen to paper," in the process itself of writing. At the moment of |
i
composing, the writer becomes writer/reader, or, in other words, the reader
of his own writing as it is produced. Subsequent readers will resupply the
voice, but the voice they use is their own.
Revocalizing texts is crucial because of all that the printed word does
[
not "say." It is the step between the written sign and meaning. Interlocutors :
in a conversation don’t necessarily need to revoice because the actual 1
speaker’s voice is still present in their echoic memory as listeners process
what they hear. Because of memory decay, when interlocutors remember
past conversations their voice becomes merged with the voices of other
speakers in the revoking. They may be able to "hear" these other voices,
the way the voices sound, and they may be able to reproduce that sound in
their memory, such as the way a friend spoke at such and such a time in ,
such and such a way, especially if it was said in a particular way that made
it salient: in anger, singularly astute or asinine, in sorrow or glee. On the
other hand, an interlocutor may also be supplying much of what the friend
said and how that friend probably would have said it. It becomes both the
hearer’s voice and the speaker’s. The fact that the friend has said something
with anger already has within it not only the speaker’s tone, pitch and j
i
i
iintonation that marked anger, but also the hearer’s value judgment, "this is
an angry person," and should the hearer reproduce it in his mind upon________
I 125
reflection, he would revoice that anger. Whether or not that revoicing has
same angry tone, pitch or intonation as the speaker’s original is irrelevant; it
now has a new voice. A similar phenomenon applies to memory of written
i
text, and much of what we recall is dependent upon how the memory works
in terms of processing and reproduction: we remember what is salient and
the precision with which we remember it depends upon that salience in
i
■addition to the value judgments we attach to it.
In reading, readers voice the words of an Other; in a different way,
those words become the readers’ and the others’. A readers adds another
I
voice to that of the author’s, creating an intermingling of voices, or as
| Bakhtin would have it, a "double-voicing." But it is not so simple as that,
for revoicing always occurs on multiple levels. When a writer quotes another
writer, she is revoicing his words by framing them within the context of her
discourse. The reader then revokes that discourse in the act of reading.
When a narrator in a novel portrays a character’s speech in direct quotation,
,he is allowing that voice to be heard, but in his own narrative context. In
reading the speech of that character, then, revoicing will involve at least
three different voices: the narrator, the character, and the reader’s. If the
narrator quotes the character indirectly or describes the character’s words,
1 the voices are controlled to a much greater extent by the narrator.
| I will elaborate more fully on this interplay of voices in the n ovel-
including the reader’s voice-in the next two chapters. The final chapter,
which concerns the use of voice in composition theory and pedagogy, will
include a discussion of the politics of voice. The question of voice, as can
be inferred from the preceding discussion, is not without social and political
ramifications, especially because it not only entails the problem of identifying
a voice, but potentially results in issues of power and domination~of one
voice over another.
Endnotes
1. It should be noted that the concept of "natural" versus "stylized" is not
uncontroversial. However, the discussion that would be required to do this
concept justice would take us too far afield from the present discussion.
2. See Thomas Kochman, Black and White Styles in Conflict (Chicago:
jUniversity of Chicago P, 1981).
3. See John J. Gumperz, Discourse Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1982) for a thorough discussion on the effects on intonation of
contextualization cues. See also Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices:
Repetition. Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989).
ft. See Scollon & Scollon, "Athapaskan-English Interethnic Communication."
Narrative. Literacy and Face in Interethnic Communication (Ablex Publishers,
jl981) 11-37 and Edward Hall, The Silent Language (Garden City, NY: Anchor
jPress/Doubleday, 1973).
5. Augustine’s description of coming upon St. Ambrose reading provides an
interesting analog. Augustine describes encountering St. Ambrose in his cell
reading silently to himself. Because it was then customary to read to oneself
aloud, this silent reading disturbs Augustine and provides a notable moment in
literacy history, the moment of private reading. This disconnection between
speech and writing may have bothered Augustine for reasons similar to those
Plato gave for distrusting writing. Because reading for St. Ambrose was a
private event, it escaped the hegemonic control of the Church. Augustine could
'neither discover nor correct St. Ambrose’s interpretation or understanding of the
text he was reading.
CHAPTER FIVE - V oices in Conflict in The Grass Harp
127
Is there a text in this discussion? (W. Ross Winterowd)
My argument has been that "voice" as a metaphor is problematic, that :
it has been applied inconsistently and variably to notions of perspective, J
ethos, and point of view to such an extent that it is difficult to know what is
meant when "voice" is used to characterize texts. The instincts we have
about voice and what we understand by it when a literary critic talks about a ;
i
"writer’s voice," are tied, I have argued, to the notions of presence, I
i
ownership, and authorship, all of which are culture-specific and limiting. [
j
What I have been arguing for in the preceding discussion of revoicing |
i
is a reader-based theory of literary criticism (and composition pedagogy; see i
Chapter 7) that makes possible a different perspective on voice.
I
Unfortunately, this reader-based perspective is not without its own unsettling j
consequences. As has been pointed out by Terry Eagle ton (among others) in
his Literary Theory, the great paradox in reader-response criticism is that if
the reader determines the text, the text itself— which has been the object of
most literary criticism to date-seem s to disappear. But don’t texts, after all,
have features? Or to borrow from W. Ross Winterowd’s paraphrase of
Stanley Fish, "Is there a text in this discussion?" On the one hand, the New
Critics, structuralists, and poststructuralists tend to dismiss the individual f
128
reader as the critical site where textual meaning occurs, while on the other
rand, theorists such as Fish--at the extrem e-argue that a text is what
lappens to the reader.
In this chapter and the one following, I will examine two different
ways of looking at voice. First, I will examine a work of fiction, The Grass
'Harp, ignoring the reader— insofar as this is possible. I will assume that texts
do have features, and I will look at the ways those features interact and
conflict as sets of discourses, and how it is possible to have a theory of
voice. In contrast to Chapter 1, this will not be an analysis of narrative;
rather it will analyze discourses, although the two are not unrelated.
In the next chapter (Chapter 6), I will look at the same novel and
restore the reader to the transaction. I will demonstrate how this inevitably
changes our notions of voice, and will proceed to dismantle or preserve, as
the case may be, the argument of Chapter 5.
I have selected The Grass Harp by Truman Capote for a number of
reasons. First, it is a work of contemporary fiction by a respected and
highly competent writer, one who has worked in both fiction and non-fiction
genres. Second, it is a work that follows established literary conventions for
the novel and as such presents a fairly typical example of modern literary
fiction. It has a narrator and a small number of characters, and Capote uses
literary dialogue in ways that are not unique (although very engaging). In
addition, Capote is a better than average writer of literary dialogue. Third,
129
The Grass Harp is a novel that treats "voices" as a major theme; the
jcharacters are engaged in power struggles to exert their own discourses or
"voices" or stories. As such, it is a novel that consists of views about '
discourses that are public and private, individual and multiple, free and
imprisoned.
I selected the novel form over other literary and non-literary genres 1
because of the its "heteroglossic" nature (Bakhtin’s terminology). Although I j
do not subscribe to the Bakhtinian assertion that the novel is the genre
where the dialogic nature of discourse finds its fullest manifestation, I would
|
'argue that the novel is a very fertile ground for the interplay of different
kinds of discourses, and that these can be readily recognized and examined.
I will use methods of real-world discourse analysis in my treatment of
voice in imaginative literature; therefore, I am treating fictional discourse as j
if it were historically real. Even though the author of imaginative literature
creates all the discourses himself, he is predisposed to accept not only the
rules that he himself invented in the presentation of these discourses, but
j
also those rules that make his invention acceptable to an audience who, in
general, look for characters they can identify with and discourses they can
understand.
Finally, a word about what is meant here by "discourses." I do not
i
simply mean the actual language spoken by a person or character, but I use
130
the term in the sense that linguist James G ee has. In his article, "Self,
i
j
Society, Mushfake, and Vygotsky," G ee writes,
Discourses are ways of being in the world, or forms of life
which integrate words, acts, values, beliefs, attitudes, social
identities, as w ell as gestures, glances, body positions, and
clothes. (178)
Discourse, G ee argues, needs to be regarded in the larger sense, as "saying-
(writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations" (178). A person’s or
character’s discourse is also her speaking persona, her ethos, the ways in
which she enters the world and negotiates her status and power therein. It
is language with the value systems and personal identities attached. These
are plural in the sense that people are familiar with a number of discourses
I
and can use them fluently. As I mentioned in an earlier chapter, most of us
are familiar with certain kinds of discourses: student discourse, discourse
between friends and family members, professional discourses, baby talk, and
!
so on. The language we use in each of these instances is inextricable fropi j
l
the persona we project and from ways of acting that are concomitant with
using that language.
THE READERLESS TEXT
The Grass Harp is a vivid example of a literary work in which
different discourses (or "voices") simultaneously allow, support, and
undermine each other, on both linguistic and thematic levels. As I have said,
131
this short novel is itself about voices, how they interact and conflict; it is a
novel and a text about dominance, submission and voicelessness.
The story centers around the observations of a first-person narrator,
Collin Fenwick, as he looks back on an experience in his early teens. After
the death of his parents, Collin is taken on by two middle-aged women,
Verena Talbo, an intimidating, difficult, and domineering woman and her
sister, Dolly, who is compliant and good-natured. Dolly’s best friend is
Catherine Creek, apparently a. Black woman, who claims she is an American
Indian. Catherine has no teeth; she fills her mouth with cotton, and nobody,
according to Collin, can understand what she says except Dolly. Verena
undertakes a project to market Dolly’s herbal cure for dropsy; in so doing,
she threatens to appropriate the only real passion and "possession" that Dolly
can call her own in a household strictly governed and controlled by Verena.
Dolly rebels and in the ensuing fallout, Dolly moves out of the Talbo house
and into a treehouse. Catherine and Collin, and eventually several others
including Judge Charlie Cool and a local bad boy, Riley Henderson, join her.
The rest of the story is the struggle by Verena and the townspeople to get
Dolly et al. out of the treehouse and back to the civilized world below.
The "grass harp" refers to a field of high Indian grass in a pasture
near the treehouse. Collin tells the reader that according to Dolly the grass
harp is always speaking. ”[I]t knows the stories of all the people on the hill,
of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours,____
132
too" (9). But more important it provides a primary metaphor for what
happens in the novel, both thematically and linguistically. As Collins says:
A waterfall of color flowed across the dry and strumming
leaves; and I wanted then for the Judge to hear what Dolly had
told me: that it was a grass harp gathering, telling, a harp of
voices remembering a story. We listened. (97)
The metaphor emphasizes the multivocality of the novel as much as it
implies a strong connection between hearing a story and reading a story; for
the only way we can hear the harp is to read Collin’s (and Capote’s)
description of it.
The dominant subtext of this novel is the portrayal of conflicting
speakers (characters, narrator, etc.) whose discourses are brought into the
text by the author; these discourses both support and undermine the author’s
textual authority. The text is a ground on which the discourses of the
speakers are only apparently controlled by the narrating power; they are
actually controlled and integrated only to escape that control. Traditionally,
we think of the author as the ultimate authority and arbitrator of her text,
but the textual dynamics are far more anomalous and multi-vocal, and the
textual authority far more fragmented, than proponents of much of
traditional literary criticism, especially objective criticism, seem to
acknowledge. One of the primary arenas in which these conflicts are
enacted is the linguistic arena, in the handling of direct and indirect reported
133
speech. The following section describes some of these variations and
discusses their implications in terms of textual dynamics.
✓
DIRECT/INDIRECT REPORTED SPEECH STRUCTURES
In his essay "Reported Speech," V.N. Volosinov discusses the many
variants of reported speech forms and the degree to which reported speech is
particularized and colored by the primary speaker--the one who is reporting
or narrating. Volosinov writes, "The reporting context strives to break down
the self-contained compactness of the reported speech, to resolve it, to
obliterate its boundaries" (155). This phenomenon can be construed as an
act of violence in that the discourse of a speaker can be reframed, altered,
usurped, or even crushed by an appropriating speaker. The degree of
violence depends upon the extent to which the direct discourse is embedded
in the narrating discourse, and the degree to which indirect speech is
"depersonalized" (164). Depersonalization implies that the integrity of a
speaker is at risk when his discourse is appropriated by another speaker and
further, that his "person-ness" is threatened. In other words, the rhetorical
ethos no longer belongs entirely to him, but is shared or completely
controlled by the appropriating speaker.
Volosinov examines several different variants of reported speech, the
first of which— and very common in The Grass Harp— is where direct speech
134
is a continuation of indirect speech, so that the discourse is part narration,
part reported speech. For example, from The Grass Harp:
Mrs. Country begged pardon if she’d said anything to upset me;
with her kitchen-slopped apron she wiped my face, and we
laughed, had to, at the mess it made, the paste of flour and
tears, and I felt, as they say, a lot better, kind of lighthearted.
(60)
Mrs. Country’s wording, as direct discourse, could have been any variation on
the following: "Pardon me if I’ve said anything to upset you." Or it may
not have included the same lexical or syntactical structure at all, as in "What
I said didn’t bother you, did it? Excuse me if it did." Both examples have
subtle differences in meaning, the second possibly having a slightly more
surly undertone. In the penultimate line of the above excerpt, the
expression, "as they say," meaning something to the effect of "as is often or
commonly said in such circumstances," implies that a number of speakers
have said things like " I felt a lot better . . . ." or "One feels a lot better
once one has had a good cry." It is likely that people have said something
to this effect in a number of different ways, depending on context, speaker
personality, etc. In both of the above instances, the narrating speaker
strongly influences the light in which the direct speech is cast, because the
direct speech is subsumed within the narrator’s lexicon and grammatical
structure.
In addition, an author predefines characters so that when they do
speak, as Volosinov points out, "[t]he referential weight of the reported
135
utterances declines . . . but their characterological significance, their
picturesqueness, or their time-and-place typicality grows more intense" (168).
This significance or picturesqueness, then, is largely governed by the author.
Like a character appearing in a clown costume, Volosinov argues, the readers
I
are prepared to laugh before they hear the character’s words. Readers have '
an image of Mrs. Country (above), the wife of a baker who works in an
oven-hot, comforting environment, which is already predetermined by the
narrative before readers read the narrator’s account of what she says.
Although I’m not convinced that Volosinov views the presentation of
reported speech as a conflict of discourses, he does acknowledge that
different discourses have a certain thematic autonomy. His position,
j
however, is that in a text these themes become wedded to one another i
through the narrator’s appropriation of the discourse of others. H e writes:
[0]nce [reported speech] becomes a constructional unit in the
author’s speech, into which it has entered on its own, the
reported message concurrently becomes a theme of that speech.
It enters into the latter’s thematic design precisely as reported,
a message with its own autonomous theme: the autonomous
theme thus becomes a theme of a theme" (149).
In the incorporation and integration of the discourses of different characters
and different personas, the character and persona not only change one
another but devolve into a composite. It is a composite, however, that is
inherently mutable and unstable, always moving out of its merged state into
multiformity and multivocality. What the reader does with this multivocality
136
in the construction of unified, coherent meaning will be taken up in the next
chapter.
Many, if not most, of the forms of reported speech that Volosinov
discusses appear in The Grass Harp. The following is a preliminary typology
of reported speech forms in The Grass Harp, offered to facilitate an
investigation into some of the conflicts mentioned above. I present these as
separate entities with the caveat that— especially in The Grass Harp-each
kind of representation of reported speech usually co-occurs with other
reported speech types.
A) Directly reported speech. In this type, reported speech, primarily
of that of the characters, appears in quotations.
In the following example, Judge Charlie Cool is telling the group in
the treehouse, Collin, Dolly, Catherine, and Riley, how his sons disapprove
of the correspondence between himself and a young girl in Alaska with
whom he, as an old man passing himself off as a young law student,
exchanges letters:
"And that’s what they think is shameful?" said Dolly,
more piqued than indignant. "Because you’ve helped keep
company a lonely little child in Alaska? It snows there so
much."
Judge Cool closed his hand over the nugget [the girl had
sent him], "Not that they’ve mentioned it to me. But I’ ve
heard them talking at night, my sons and their wives: wanting
to know what to do about me. Of course they’d spied out the
letters. I don’t believe in locking drawers— seems strange a man
can’t live without keys in what was at least once his own house.
They think it all a sign of . . ." H e tapped his head.
137
"I had a letter once. Collin, sugar, pour me a taste," said
Catherine, indicating the wine. "Sure enough, I had a letter
once, still got it somewhere, kept it twenty years wondering
who was wrote it. Said Hello Catherine, come on to Miami
and marry with me, love Bill."
"Catherine. A man asked you to marry him— and you
never told one word of it to me?"
Catherine lifted a shoulder. "Well, Dollyheart, what was
the Judge saying? You don’t tell anybody everything. Besides,
I’ve known a peck of Bills— wouldn’t study marrying any of
them. What worries my mind is, which one of the Bills was it
wrote that letter? I’d like to know, seeing as it’s the only letter
I ever got. (42-43)
As in all of the passages of this type in the novel, Collin, the first person
narrator, speaks very little; we intermittently lose touch with his discourse;
his impact is indirect. Instead, the characters are foregrounded; their
conflicts, interactions, and discourses become central. Further, the characters
are freer from auctorial influence than if their speeches were reported
indirectly, in Collin’s words. But they are not completely free because Collin
is in control (at least, this is the fictional reality) in the selection of the
dialogue and the presentation. While in these passages Collin’s interference
(and power) is the least, Collin’s persona, i.e., Collin’s way of speaking-
acting-thinking-being in the world, does not disappear.
It should be noted again that although Collin is Capote’s creation,
Capote, in creating Collin, establishes certain rules and norms that he, as
author, cannot violate. Collin cannot suddenly turn into Judge Charlie Cool.
Thus, one could argue that the world of The Grass Harp, although fictional,
is as normative as the "real" world.____________________
138
The character conflicts in the above passage become more apparent
when characters speak directly, i.e., when they are portrayed through directly-
reported speech. These conflicts occur on a number of levels. First, I
Catherine’s syntax and lexicon are much more colloquial ("a peck of Bills,"
"wondering who was wrote it") than that of the Judge or Dolly, and these
different styles contrast and contribute to the thematic conflict, Dolly, who
generally speaks in standard, noncolloquial English, has the kind of ;
i
dominance over Catherine that typifies much of language interaction, that is, i
the domination of one dialect over another because of prevailing cultural or
political standards.
In addition, Dolly says very little. It has been argued that in actual
conversation, the ability to retain the floor for extended periods demonstrates !
i
the power of the speaker.1 That speaker can indicate who is to respond and
at what point, or she can extend her turn indefinitely by restricting
opportunities for the other interlocutors to respond. On the other hand,
speakers may also dominate through their skillful negotiation of the floor and
do not necessarily need to monopolize the conversation to exert power. For
example, Dolly’s dialogue consists of fairly short sentences, almost all
questions. In asking a question, she shapes the responses. In actual
dialogues, the speakers who ask questions or invite responses relinquish
control to some degree because they cannot always predict what those
responses will be. Whether or not this is a fictional conceit, that is, a facet
139
I
of the fictional "reality" that Capote has created, Dolly nonetheless seems
able to predict the kinds of responses she will get and this is where her
strength as a speaker lies. Other characters may talk often and at length,
I
but they almost always defer to her.
Reticence may be one of the strengths of Dolly’s persona. While
Catherine also asks questions, she answers them herself ("what was the Judge
saying? You don’t tell everybody everything") and therefore appears to have ;
i
little confidence in her own conversational skill; she won’t relinquish the
floor. In her proclivity to talk for relatively long periods of time on various
topics, Catherine reveals much more of herself than Dolly. Both the Judge
and Catherine have extended narratives in this section of the novel about
things that have happened to them. They hold the floor, temporarily
dominating conversations, but both are trying to respond to Dolly and please
j
her; Dolly’s power holds sway over both of them (in fact, finally, over
everyone in the novel). In phrasing what little she says in the form of
questions, Dolly forces the other characters to respond to her, not she to
them. Furthermore, because this is written discourse and fictional writing at
that, characters do not, in fact cannot, stray too far afield from the author’s
agenda in pursuit of their own.
The linguistic negotiations I have discussed thus far are conflicts for
which there are never truly resolutions. Dolly directs with a scolding remark
or a question; the respondents gain control temporarily, in their own ways,
with long-winded responses. Very few of these dynamics would be apparent
if the author had chosen to portray all of the characters’ conversation
indirectly. In a way, the author intermittently allows himself and his narrator
to be eclipsed by his characters.
Another interesting aspect of the novel that pertains to the direct
speech depicted in the above passage is that apparently-according to C ollin-
Catherine’s speech, garbled by the cotton she carries around in her mouth, J
cannot be understood by anyone but Dolly. But her dialogue is presented to
the reader as clearly and extensively as any of the other characters. She
represents noise to most of the other characters, irritating and
incomprehensible, and this situation is rendered very complex because Dolly
always listens.to her and understands. Furthermore, Collin listens to her; he
notes and describes her speech as if he also understands it. Hence, one w ho! J
has no apparent power over other characters-for in addition to speaking a
language no one can understand, she is also a minority-Catherine is
paradoxically portrayed as a character with a great deal of power, precisely
because she can and does speak; she takes up physical space on the page. If
power has anything to do with dominating the floor, then Catherine is a
powerful persona. Her discourse is directly represented, and the reader and
other characters need to attend to it as it is.
If, however, we believe what Collin says, that only Dolly can
understand Catherine, then Collin’s representation of Catherine’s discourse
141
must be filtered through Dolly. Hence, the overarching author-in his control
of the novelistic world— undermines his own narrator’s control and presents
the reader with a contradiction that somehow must find its resolution in the
reader’s mind.
Recent attention in linguistics has been paid to the co-construction of j
narratives in actual speech. In "Notes on Story Structure and the |
i
I
Organization of Participation" (1984), Charles Goodwin has looked at how
speakers preface stories and argued that these prefaces serve as projections
to determine whether an interlocutor or audience will accept or reject a
I
proposed topic or story. Elinor Ochs has argued that many story-telling |
narratives that appear to be a single speaker holding the floor may be |
merely a result of transcription; the pure monologic nature of this speech act j
may not be what actually transpires. She and K. Mandelbaum argue that 1
stories are most often co-authored; the speaker’s narrative is shaped by
responses from a listener that include comments, evaluations, exclamations,
requests for more information, and other types of responses. Consider the
following example, taken from Mandelbaum:2
A: I’m so tired. I just played basketball today since the first time
since I was a freshman in high school.
B: (overlaps "school") Basketball? Where?
A: (overlaps "Where") Yeah for like a hour and a half.
B: (overlaps "half") Hhh. Where did you play basketball?
A: (overlaps "basketball") The gym. i
B: In the gym? Hh.
A: (overlaps "Hh") Yeah. Like group therapy. You know half the
group that we had . . . !
142
/
B: (overlaps "half the group") Ooh. Hh.
A: . . . last term was there and we just playing around.
B: Uh-fooling around.
A: (overlapping "fooling") Hh. EM-yeah, so some of the guys
who were better, you know, went off by themselves so it was
two girls against this one guy and he’s tall.
In the above passage, Speaker B helps to drive the Speaker A ’s narrative
jwith comments, clarifications, requests for clarification, corrections, and
various phatic responses to show he is listening and caring that the narrative
continue. There is a sharing of power. In the novel, on the other hand, the
co-construction is much more abbreviated because the novel is ultimately for
a third party, the reader, and not solely an exchange between two or more
characters. A character is powerful not because she dominates other
characters, although this is part of it. Rather, her power is determined by
how the author chooses to present the character in relation to the other
characters and the narrator. Thus, the degree to which a character’s
discourse is embedded in another’s (or in the narrator’s) becomes an
important factor in understanding characterological dominance.
In another passage of The Grass Harp. Sister Ida, a gypsy-like woman
with a dozen children by different and absent husbands, wanders onto the
group and presents a monologue of four pages as she tells the story of her
jlife; it is the longest passage of uninterrupted reported speech in the novel.
The story and, hence, the speaking floor become Ida’ s, but only in a limited
way because she in turn imports her own characters and their discourses into
143
ler narrative, although none of it is directly-reported speech; she thus retains
'or herself much of the control. She manages to usurp the power of the
other characters (from both the scene in the novel and from her own
narrative), and, to the extent to which she or any character introduced into
h e text is able, she usurps Collin’s power.
B) Isolated directly reported speech. This is a single line of direct
discourse, marked by quotation marks, but without a directly-reported
response or rejoinder from another character(s). Example:
"By the way," said the Judge, "where is Riley?"
H e’d run ahead of me, that was the last I’d seen of him;
with an anxiety that struck us simultaneously, the Judge and I
stood up and started yelling his name. (51)
[This type of reported speech occurs most often when Collin’s response is the
second pair part, that is, the rejoinder to the initial piece of dialogue. The
reader has no way of knowing if Collin said anything at all; he may have
given the Judge a look. Any direct response by Collin is assimilated into his
narrative. The reader might guess that the response in this case parallels
Collin’s indirect discourse (the response might be something like "He’d run
ahead of me, that was the last I’d seen of him"). But whatever Collin’s
presumed response, it is withheld; the reader is only provided with the gist,
thus foregrounding the Judge’s discourse. The Judge’s discourse is made
more prominent for a number of reasons: it is directly represented; it serves
to cue a response that is only indirectly alluded to; and it is in quotation
144
marks, a convention that will be discussed in the next chapter as a cue to
the reader.
Collin presents himself as the most passive member of the group. H e
follows Dolly into the treehouse, apparently does precisely what she or
anyone else says, and by his own admission, is intimidated by Riley, a young
man only slightly older than himself but much more worldly, who joins them j
in the treehouse. Collin almost never represents himself in direct discourse,
which may underscore his passivity, yet ironically it is Collin who never
ceases to speak; passages where he quotes characters indirectly are passages I
where he exerts the most control.
C) Direct discourse without quotation marks. This is reported speech
that reads like speech but is not enclosed by quotation marks. For example:
i
Maude took the blame: she confessed to having invited
some boys over to listen to the radio and dance; but it was the j
sisters who got punished. [Riley’d] dragged them out of bed !
and whipped them. I asked him what did he mean, whipped
them? Turned them over m y knee, he said, and whipped them
with a tennis shoe. I couldn’t picture this; it conflicted with my
sense of Elizabeth’s dignity. You're too hard on those girls, I
said, adding vindictively: Maude, now there's the bad one. (62, i
emphasis mine)
This passage begins representing the reported speech indirectly ("Maude took
the blame: she confessed to"), then moves to a more direct representation ("I
asked him what did he mean") where the third person pronoun still marks
i
indirect reporting, but the insertion of an auxiliary "did," instead of saying
(indirectly) " I asked him what he meant," suggests more direct discourse.
145
t
Finally, with "You’re too hard on those girls," only the lack of quotation ;
i
marks separates this from direct speech interchanges characterized in A)
above. The fact that the paragraph begins with indirectly-reported dialogue
?ives even the speech that seems most direct an indirect quality, hence more
owned by Collin, more colored by his point of view on the scene.
D ) Indirectly reported speech. This is reported speech
embedded in the narrator’s discourse and represented indirectly via
complementizers or infinitive constructions. The preceding excerpt contains a
good example of this as does the following: !
Verena often remarked that there would be trouble if
anyone ever got poisoned, but otherwise she did not show much
interest in the dropsy cure. (18, emphasis mine)
And:
Dolly, already awake, insisted I apologize for cursing him . . .
The Judge grouched that a body didn’t feel human till he’d had
a pot of hot coffee. We agreed that coffee was what we all
most missed. Riley volunteered to drive into town to get some
. . . H e suggested I come with him .... (57, emphasis mine)
"Verena remarked," "Dolly insisted," "the Judge grouched," "We agreed" and i
so on are the narrator’s framing of his interpretation of what the characters
have to say. It is not clear whether the remarking or insisting or grouching
are characterizations the speakers would give to their own discourses or
whether they belong entirely to the narrative framework. It is equally
unclear whether what the characters remark or insist or grouch about belongs
to the character or narrator. Volosinov calls this "quasi-direct discourse,"
146
and he argues that instances of this do not represent a mingling of direct
and indirect discourse, but rather a new phenomenon. H e writes: "[Qjuasi-
direct discourse is not a simple mechanical mixture or arithmetical sum of
two forms, but a completely new, positive tendency in active reception of
another persons’ utterance" (Marxism 142).
From another standpoint, one could argue that the narrator does not
claim authorship or responsibility for what goes in between quotation marks.
It is the narrator’s point of view, but not the narrator’s speaking voice, a
I
notion that coincides with the views of narratologists discussed in Chapter 1.
| !
In Unspeakable Sentences. Ann Banfield makes a distinction between point L --• }
I
of view and speaking voice. She argues that "Any subject confronting the |
world necessarily adopts a position from which he perceives what will
constitute his visual field, his experience" (68). It is not a grammatical
notion, but a pragmatic one. Point of view is a kind of "telling" (69). The
first person narrative is one kind of telling; the third person narrative is
another kind. The speaking voice is the one literally speaking or whose
discourse is actually represented, either directly or indirectly.
Both views, however, fail to come to terms with the inherently
conflictual nature of discourses blended in this way. It is perhaps in this
type of representation of another’s speech where the conflict between
narrator and character is most acute yet least obvious. Indirectly-reported
speech does not represent two point of views; it represents only the
147
narrator’s and his appropriation of another’s discourse. This appropriation, as
i
j
[ have already argued, is in some ways an act of violence, and it is a conflict i
that is ultimately played out in the mind of the reader (next chapter).
E) Implied discourse. This is a version o f indirectly-reported speech
in which the possible or potential wording is not even hinted at, but merely j
given vague indications. The exact wording is only implied. For example:
Catherine wanted to follow me up the ladder into the attic,
except she had on her fine clothes. (22) ;
The reader is given no specifics as to what Catherine said to induce Collin
jto come up the ladder with her (keeping in mind also that according to
Collin, the only person who can understand Catherine is Dolly, and Dolly is
j I
not present in this scene). What might have been articulated~it could have
been non-verbal as in a gesture— is left to the reader.
Some days afterwards I met Elizabeth Henderson on the street.
She’ d been at the beauty parlor, for her hair was fingerwaved,
her nails tinted, she did look grown-up and I complimented her.
(88, emphasis mine)
In the above example, the reader doesn’t know how Collin might have j
complimented her, thus must take his word for it that he did so and that it
would, of course, be understood by Elizabeth. It can probably be assumed
that there was some preliminary chat in the form of greetings before the
i
compliment.
And, a final example of implied discourse:
148
N o one in our town ever had themselves so much talked about
as Riley Henderson. Older people spoke of him with sighing
voices, and those nearer his own age, like myself, were glad to
call him mean and hard: that was because he would only let
us envy him, would not let us love him, be his friend. (26)
Precisely what the older people of the town said (in sighing voices) is given
only vague indications. Because of the syntax of "Older people . . . like
myself were glad to call him mean and hard," the reader is meant to assume
the adjectives "mean" and "hard" were used to describe Riley. If, on the
other hand, the sentence had read, "Older people, like myself said that he
was mean and hard," a reader cannot assume that "mean" or "hard" were the
exact descriptors that the characters would have used. In general, in
indirectly-reported speech, the language of the character’s dialogue is left to
the reader to reconstruct. Nonetheless, Collin’s insight ("that was because he
would only let us envy him, would not let us love him, be his friend") gives
us additional information on how difficult or awkward a conversation with
■'Riley might be and keys a reader’s response to subsequent representations of
Riley and his discourse.
VOICES IN CONFLICT
A number of important conflicts in the novel occur in conjunction
with the variations in the representation of direct speech. Some of these
conflicts play themselves out in terms of these variations; others operate at
149
the level of contrastive themes, while still others are better examined from
the purview of the reader and will be left to the next chapter.
Although all the speakers in the text are introduced and overseen by
the narrator (Collin Fenwick), the power struggles do not necessarily involve
him. It should likewise be noted that none of the conflicts are discrete from
any other; their interconnectedness and multi-layeredness are distinctive
features. Hence the categorization I engage in here can be only one of
many possible and is hardly definitive.
The following, then, are some of the voices in conflict that are at
work in the novel.
1. Collin vs. other characters. When people tell a story, they often
lhave specific goals that they build into that telling, goals that range from
presentation of self to desired impact Gn the audience. IiT most cases, the
two are inseparable, for if a storyteller has in mind to tell a story as a kind
of moral lesson for an audience, she must also present a suitable ethos that
serves to accomplish these aims.
In a novel containing different characters, there are multiple
personalities— even though they are all created by a single writer— and the
goals of the primary speaker may come into conflict with the goals of the _
characters that the primary speaker allows to speak. In fact, some of these
conflicts may be part of the message the author is trying to convey.
Characters in a novel or short story, as representations or facsimiles of
150
■people or types of people, also bring with them their own networks of goals
and agendas, which do not necessarily coincide with the narrator’s, even ,.,
when the narrator is using these specific characters to tell the story.
In The Grass Harp. Collin wants to tell a story about an event in his
jearly life as a way, he says, of explaining the aimlessness that characterizes
his present life. As we have seen in the handling of direct and indirect
speech, as narrator, Collin is— if we accept the fictional reality Capote has
created— in control of the story and his characters. But it is only on a
i
superficial level that Collin has the upper hand. In using Dolly, Catherine, ' ^
1
1
Verena and the others as raw material, his story will be perpetually changed
and undermined by these characters and what they bring to the text, simply
by their induction into the narrative. To understand this, several different
i
strands can be unravelled here, among them: slant (to borrow from j
Chatman), persona, and story, all of which potentially function under the
umbrella term of "voice."
For example, characters have their own slant or attitude toward other ;
characters and events. Collin depicts Dolly’s slant in the way he describes
her outlook and in the presentation of her dialogue. For example, Dolly
I
allows herself to be dominated by her sister, but is willing to fight for what
i
is meaningful to her, the rights to her medicinal cure. In her eyes, Verena
is not evil, just misguided. For Catherine, by contrast, Verena is the devil
incarnate. i
151
The characters’ personas are not independent of their slant. Dolly’s
persona, again as portrayed by Collin, is generally mild-mannered but
commanding; she is difficult to anger, but stubborn. Catherine, by contrast,
is volatile and seems to say whatever is on her mind.
Finally, each character has a story, as distinguished from plot. In the
fictional world of the novel, Collin, as narrator, structures the plot, but there
are numerous stories in the novel. Russian formalist Boris Tomashevsky’s
distinction between story and plot is appropriate here. The story is the
arrangement of thematic elements that have causal-temporal relationships
j(Tomashevsky 66) and the plot, though it includes some of the same events,
is the arrangement of these events "according to the orderly sequence in
which they [are] presented in the work" (67). The plot is how the reader
jlearns of the action. The story in The Grass Harp is the series of events
leading up to the major characters’ arrival at the tree house, what happens
there and how they get down. But each of the characters, because they
have different perspectives and personas, also has different versions of the
story (and, of course would also conceivably have different ways of telling it
if given the opportunity, i.e., different plots); they would view the story and"
their role in it differently. These variations are not just potential; they
manifest themselves in what the reader is allowed by Collin to see, via
Collin’s description, and hear, through the representation of characters’
speech on the page. ____________________________________________ \ _______
152
Slant, persona, and story are incorporated into a character’s discourse,
and readers are witnesses to the interaction of these discourses. These
L— -
discourses conflict because the one does not ever completely subsume the
other. The characters represent different people with different needs, drives,
and personalities that are often incompatible, thematically as well as
linguistically. Catherine, perhaps the most antagonistic personality in the
novel (though not the antagonist) is not only incomprehensible to the other
characters, but the combination of her aggressive noises, racial background,
and volatile personality type--her discourse in the large sense in which I am
using it— makes others (Verena, the townspeople) bewildered and angry. The
discourses give rise to an opposition of forces, and this provides the dramatic
action of the novel.
B. Author vs. Collin, the narrator. The author-narrator relationship
is probably the single most difficult relationship to unravel, and is one of the
central concerns of narratologists (as I discussed in Chapter l).3 Here, I will
examine the relationship in terms of the kinds o f conflicts I have been
elaborating on above.
Traditionally, everything in a novel or a poem — the language, the
characters, what they say, how they act-has been regarded as emanations
from the author’s imagination. I have questioned this assumption in Chapter^/
3 by pointing to the fact that an author makes use of a number of different
discourses, none of which can truly be called her own. These discourses are
153
socially acquired (in language learning), socially mediated (shaped by an
I 1 ', r ^
imagined or real audience), and socially understood (by a reader or a
listener). When a writer claims to hear characters talking in her head in the
act of composing her novel, or when she imagines dialogues taking place j
between her characters, she is hearing the voices of others; some o f these ^ j
may be actual voices or composites of actual voices. The author selects and
shapes the discourses so that what appears on the page seems to be her own.
Although Capote fixes Collin’s goals in telling the story, he also j
arranges it so that Collin’s goals are at odds with his own authorial goals.
Capote uses Collin as his instrument, having Collin introduce voices that
t
undermine Collin’s authority. The reader’s tacit confidence in Collin’s J
I
veracity and the understanding, at least preliminarily, that Collin is telling the :
truth, telling only what needs to be known, what is relevant, and so forth, is
inevitably weakened as the reader learns more, often through information
furnished by other characters but also by what happens in the plot. Collin,
i
for example, describes himself as a shy young man who says very little and
asserts himself even less. This self-portrait is cast in doubt by the plot
action wherein Collin actually makes brave (and assertive) decisions to fly in
the face of authority, e.g., to join Dolly in the treehouse.
i
Capote does not speak except through Collin. In a sense, however, j
Collin resists the author’s control. Capote’s voice is hidden within Collin’s
and emerges only when we examine authorial positioning from a meta-
154
perspective, that is, with the recognition that Collin is always and only
Capote’s creation. Capote manipulates Collin, divides up Collin’s world,
makes chapters, ends Collin’s narratives, and structures Collin’s narrative
jvoice so that Collin speaks as though he is talking to himself while at the
same time confidentially to an interlocutor, itself a literary conceit. In the
opening paragraph, for example, Collin asks a rhetorical question-"When was j
it that first I heard of the grass harp?"-a question directed to himself and
simultaneously to the interested anonymous reader. Collin answers himself -
in a colloquial, conversational syntax, which, at the same time, is highly
structured into paragraphs, chapters, and, for the most part, complete I
sentences. Collin is neither truly talking to himself, nor recounting a
personal confessional to an audience. H e is writing a novel, or more
Jprecisely, he is telling the tale of Capote’s novel.
*
The power of Collin’s character and narrative is such that the author |
almost completely disappears. And yet he can’t totally absent himself.
Capote as author represents a higher order, undermining and undermined by
Collin’ s lower order.
i
C. Character conflict. Plot-wise, the Dolly-Verena conflict is probably
the central characterological conflict in the novel. Verena, domineering and
assertive, wants to control everyone and everything in her life and generally
succeeds. She speaks the novel’s dominant discourse; the combination of her
commanding, authoritarian presence and the way she uses language enables
155
tier to exert hegemony over every other character in the novel, even Judge
Cool. Dolly, on the other hand, is soft-spoken, compliant, and willing to be
controlled. However, when Verena threatens Dolly’s individual voice, when
Verena wants to usurp what Dolly is loath to surrender, Dolly rebels.1 '
Instead of confronting Verena verbally, the ground on which Verena must
inevitably win, Dolly retreats, linguistically, physically, and metaphorically,
removing herself from any verbal engagement with Verena. Dolly moves out
of Verena’s house and away from the Verena’s world. She moves up into a
treehouse, where she becomes another person: voluble (as measured by the
<
dramatic increase in reported speech), authoritative (everyone who enters the j
treehouse defers to her), and, suddenly, powerful. The novelistic world has
changed; Dolly’s discourse-her style of speaking, acting, and doing-has
become the dominant discourse. It is only when she chooses to step out of
the treehouse that she relinquishes that authority, but even that is her choice; J
she is not actually driven from power. When she does come down, she
speaks very little, again as measured by the reduction in the amount of
reported speech.
The following is from a scene early in the novel in which Verena and i
Dr. Morris Ritz present to Dolly their plan to market Dolly’s secret cure for j
dropsy. They show her the labels that they have had made up for the
bottles that will contain the medicine.
156
The labels twitched in Dolly’s hand. "I’m not sure I
understand."
"Of course you do," said Verena, smiling thinly. "It’s
obvious enough. I told Morris that old story of yours and he
thought of this wonderful name."
"Gipsy Queen Dropsy Cure: very catchy, that," said the
doctor. "Look great in the ads."
" My medicine?" said Dolly, her eyes still lowered. "But I
don’t need any labels, Verena, I write my own."
Dr. Ritz snapped his fingers. "Say, that’s good! We can
have labels printed like her own handwriting: personal, see?"
"We’ve spent enough money already," Verena told him
briskly; and, turning to Dolly, said: "Morris and I are going up \
to Washington this week to get a copyright on these labels and
register a patent for the medicine— naming you as the inventor,
naturally. Now the point is, Dolly, you must sit down and
write out a complete formula for us."
Dolly’s face loosened; and the labels scattered on the
floor, skimmed. Leaning her hands on the table she pushed
herself upward; slowly her features came together again, she
lifted her head and looked blinkingly at Dr. Ritz, at Verena.
"It won’t do," she said quietly. She moved to the door, put a
hand on its handle. "It won’t do: because you haven’t any
^ right, Verena. Nor you, sir." (21)
This excerpt represents a major turning point in the relationship between
D olly and Verena. This confrontation locks the conflict; Dolly resists the
hegemony of Verena. Dr. Ritz, an outsider and interloper, is altogether
unable to exert any power in the conversation, even over Dolly. H e doesn’t
know the discourse. Dolly won’t answer or even acknowledge Dr. Ritz when
he talks, refusing to give him the floor, diminishing his power. Dolly appeals
instead to Verena. But Dr. Ritz tries to assert himself, interrupting and
continuing to talk until Verena shuts him out. Verena dominates; she
commands; she tells; she doesn’t ask. Dolly allows her to control, by asking
157
'or clarification, asking questions, giving her the floor. Even when Dolly
resists Verena and Dr. Ritz, cutting short their conversational goals of trying
to persuade her to cheerfully acquiesce, she does so by leaving rather then
^engaging. Even the use of "It" in Dolly’s last turn to talk, beginning with "It
won’t do," indicates a reluctance to inject herself into the conversation, as in
" I won’t do it." She thereby avoids personalizing a confrontation that is
already very personal, possibly sensing that she will risk losing even more
ground to Verena. Leaving the dining room and ultimately the house is the
only way she avoids complete forfeiture of herself.
Other character conflicts include Collin vs. the Judge, Collin vs. Riley,
Verena vs. Morris Ritz, Catherine vs. almost everyone, the townspeople vs.
the Judge. In actual speech situations, each interlocutor wields power
differently. In The Grass Harp, this holds true on two levels. Many of the
characters have distinctive discourses. Catherine’s discourse is laden with
colloquial language and is often in non-standard dialect such as her remark
to Riley: "Snuggle up, hard head, you cold like anybody else" (46). Judge
Cool’s discourse, by contrast, is standard, non-colloquial English and more
erudite-sounding, as befits his profession as a lawyer.
On the second level, the author portrays discourses differently. For
example, as mentioned above, Collin rarely quotes himself directly (although
it might be assumed that he speaks in a manner similar to his narrative).
Events which most probably include dialogue between characters, such as
158
'between Riley and his family or the townspeople, are very often reported on
rather than represented directly, indicating, perhaps, the nature of the
narrator’s relationship with these characters. Typical examples include:
j'Riley sent the girls home" (54) where a reader might assume that Riley said
something to the girls, but what he said to send them home is not indicated;
"we listened to his report" (54), where the report is summarized in Collin’s
discourse; and "Riley was in a temper" (62), which presumably would have
included some form of spoken language. Collin says he both admires and
fears Riley; hence his manner of portraying Riley’s discourse may be
connected to this subtextual theme.
D. "Other" discourse vs. narrative. By "other" discourse I refer to
quoted material that appears frequently in the novel: telegrams, tombstones,
letters, labels, and slogans, some of which occasionally appears in italics.
This is discourse that belongs neither to the narrator nor to the characters.
For example:
Many years later, when the Talbo estate was being settled, I
came across the handwritten original of this telegram -
composed, I believe by Dr. Ritz. Be on the lookout for
following persons traveling together. Dolly Augusta Talbo, white,
aged 60, yellow grayish hair, thin, height 5 feet 3, green eyes,
probably insane but not likely to be dangerous, post description
bakeries as she is cake eater. Catherine Creek, Negro, pretends
to be Indian, age about 60, toothless, confused speech, short and
heavy, strong, likely to be dangerous. Collin Talbo Fenwick,
white, age 16, looks younger, height 5 feet 7, blond, gray eyes,
thin, bad posture, scar at corner of mouth, surly natured. All
three wanted as runaways. (29, italics Capote’s)
Contrasts between the telegram and the other kinds of discourses— in this
case the narration-manifest themselves on various levels. First, there are
syntactic differences. The above is written in a modified telegram register,
Characterized in part by abbreviated syntax and use of imperative, while the
narrative does not generally use these features. Second, this passage imparts
different information from what Collin has said. The assertion, for example, ;
that Catherine is a Negro was something about which Collin was vague.
Also the passage indicates characters’ ages and physical descriptions where
j r
Collin provides very little detail. Furthermore, the passage contradicts ;
| i
Collin’s point of view about the dangerousness of Catherine and the sanity of
Dolly. It should be noted, however, that Dr. Ritz may or may not know
these particulars; these may be his own guesses or fabrications. Collin, for
this part, works to undermine the value of the telegram in the accompanying
narration by admitting he does not know its author. H e speculates that it
was written by Dr. Ritz, a man he has already portrayed as unsavory and
untrustworthy, even though a man who Verena, normally a woman of
l
extraordinary capability, trusted, even possibly loved.
u-
Again, it is passages such as these that tend to undermine the
reliability of Collin as objective narrator, for even though Collin is one of
the characters and not an objective observer and evaluator of the events that
l
unfold, the mere fact that he is the predominant speaking voice lends him an
[authority that accords him credibility. Any alternative viewpoint, however it
160
is presented, problematizes; it may even tend to unnerve an audience looking
for an authoritative, unitary voice that directs the overarching plan of the
novel. It is difficult to know for certain when Collin is lying or telling the
truth, when he is just being vague or is simply wrong or misinformed, or
when he is embellishing to make his point.
E. Narrative vs. direct and indirect discourse. In the previous section
I discussed the syntactic contrasts between the telegram register and the
narrative. A more significant contrast, because one that is more
conspicuously present in the novel, is between narrative and reported speech.
Many of the differences are obvious: reported speech is generally in present
tense while the narration is in past tense; reported speech contains
•interactive pronouns, especially "you," while narrative usually uses the third
person singular pronoun. (In his narration, Collin doesn’t directly address his
interlocutor because of the rhetorical strategy of seeming to speak to himself
as well as a reader.) Reported speech, to seem more "speechlike," often
ilacks subjects or verbs and includes fillers ("Well," "um," "er"). Nonetheless,
the syntactic distinctions between reported speech and narration are not as
pronounced as in many other novels where the narrator is not a character in
the work. Although many times it is obvious what is and what is not a
character’s dialogue, at other times the distinctions blur. The styles of
discourse become less discrete, and it is difficult to distinguish between
narrative and character speech. Collin, as I have said, speaks colloquially
161
when he narrates. By contrast, Sister Ida, another character who joins them
in the tree, has long, complex (highly embedded), "unspeechlike" sentences.
To say that syntactic contrasts are conflictual is not too strong a claim,
especially when each variant represents a different discourse, whether it be a
register variation or the speech of a different character. The fact that
Capote often weds the variations together in the same passage (for example,
/
/
(by using both indirectly-reported speech and directly-reported speech in the'
same paragraph or even the same sentence) could conceivably dissolve the
contrast. I would argue, however, this merging results in an uneasy marriage. :
Syntax that is characteristic of direct speech, for example, cues a reader to
read that passage in a specific way (See next chapter on the reader).
F. Sounds (grass harp, radio! vs. human voices. There is also the
dimension of extra-conversational noise: the radio, squawking crows (49), the
sound of a wildcat (44), thunder (77), and the sounds of the grass harp.
'Aside from the obvious literary devices typical of the sympathetic fallacy
(nature responding appropriately to a mood), these noises participate in the
same kinds of polyglossic conflicts that I have been considering. On one
i
ilevel, the noises are just that: sounds saying nothing, interfering, delaying,
filling space. But, as I have argued for spoken language, sounds qua sounds
I
-a s in intonation, pitch, and inflection-are meaningful. Secondly, sounds 1
operate on a symbolic level. They are always other voices. Although these
voices may be cryptic or enigmatic because they don’t emanate physically
162
from the human voice, as for example, the grass harp and the radio, they
still have human quality; they mirror human voices. On all levels, as noise,
echoes, or symbols of the human voice, these sounds compete for the floor.
Often they function as primal sounds in the sense of primitive or originary,
operating much like a scream; they replace voices when voices cannot or
should not be heard. For example, when Dolly is ill, she’s allowed to listen
to the radio. There’s nothing more she can say or that anyone can say to
her because all human conversations have taken place; now Dolly is dying
and the novel is winding inexorably to its dose. In addition, hearing Dolly’s
radio reminds Collin of how, sometime earlier, he listened to his sweetheart
-th is was unrequited love— play a radio recital; her violin spoke to him on a i
level she evidently never would have intended.
I
The prevailing metaphor, the grass harp, collects human voices and
their stories, then changes, harmonizes, and preserves them until they are
unlocked-or revoiced-by other voices. The grass harp may not harmonize in
any intellectually comprehensible way, but the musical harmony appeals in
some fashion (on an emotional level, usually) to a listener and composer.
The grass harp does what storytellers do and what Collin is doing; this is
what Capote has done with The Grass Harp. The storyteller has changed 1
the discourses of the characters and harmonized them, preserving them until |
*
I
revoiced by a reader who is, in essence, just another storyteller.
163
To summarize, the degree of control Collin exercises over his material
corresponds to the degree to which the discourse of the "other," that is, the
other characters and borrowings from other genres (letter, signs, etc.), are
embedded in his own. The more indirect the discourse, the more Collin’s
narrative shapes and molds. Characters have more control where segments
of reported speech are left more-or-less intact, although this dialogue is
I
framed by the narrative voice that surrounds it. ;
As illustrated in some of the examples, Capote’s style in The Grass
iHarp is largely that of using these types of speech representations together in
an admixture of forms. The result is that the characters often have a half- j
life. Much is left unclear, embedded, unowned, partially articulated, or i
unarticulated, and much is left to the reader to fill in and interpret.
Furthermore, the embedded speech often results in cacophony as
\ |
characters alternately take the speaking floor. Thus it is occasionally difficult {
to determine immediately who is speaking. This sense of dissonance or
multivocality also occurs within the dialogue of the characters themselves as
I
they incorporate other discourses, while at the same time this dialogue is |
l
embedded in the narrative discourse. For example, in,the dinner scene
already cited in part, Dr. Morris Ritz wants to know if he can have the
brains of the chicken they are eating, since this is his favorite part of the
chicken. Catherine tells him, "Dolly’s took those brains on her plate." Of j
1
1
course, Dr. Ritz cannot understand her with her mouth filled with cotton, so j
164
Catherine interprets for him, "She says I have the brains on my plate" (20).
Collin directly quotes Dolly who indirectly quotes Catherine. Each
appropriating speaker slightly alters the wording and the connotation of the
initiating phrase. Catherine responds to Dr. Ritz’s request in a gesture of
chagrin and embarrassment. Dolly uses Catherine’s words not only in
translating for Dr. Ritz but as an act of resistance. She uses to words to
i
slap at this interloper who not only cannot understand Catherine, but cannot
understand any of the family dynamic so important to his own success.
Collin plants the dialogue in the scene in a particular context in order to
t
1
orchestrate a specific interpretation. A few lines prior to the above dialogue, '
Collin says of Dr. Ritz, "He snapped his fingers and jiggled his razzle-dazzle,
dagger-sharp shoes as though keeping time to some vaudeville tune,"
emphasizing, among other things, an unfavorable view of Dr. Ritz. Capote
creates his own context, some of which is influenced by the genre in which
he is writing, the position he has as a writer, as well as the message he
wants to get across to a reader.
The Grass Harp is a novel about discourses and multiples of
i
discourses, layering one upon the other as the story develops. Voices other !
i
than that of the teller of the tale, speak almost continuously throughout the
1
novel’s 97 pages. As Collin reports his thoughts, his dialogue with an
imaginary interlocutor or with a reader is charged with the thoughts, sayings,
and idioms of others, hundreds of others, talking about more "others" and
165
serving to underscore the themes of the novel. The novel is about the
'liberation of a voice, Dolly’ s principally, and that voice’s subsequent > ,
suppression when she comes back out of the treehouse and resumes
residence at Verena’s house, declining to free herself entirely from Verena’s
control. The novel is about freedom and compromise. In the treehouse, the j
voices are more free than in the civilized world below; but the characters
must compromise, must alter their voices, conform, knuckle under to more
powerful voices and authorities if they wish to come down and live in the
world. The novel is about voices in harmony— in the treehouse, where
j
people work together in their fight to stay there-and disharmony-where the j
I
voices tangle and argue and are appropriated easily and uneasily by one
another. It is about private worlds and public worlds. In a private world,
Dolly could marry the Judge and have a life of her own; in the public one, !
the social and political forces of the town, her family, and her
responsibilities, all work against her. When Dolly, sensing the end of their
reign in the treehouse, asks Collin if the world is a bad place, Collin thinks
it over, then responds somewhat wistfully (and indirectly):
No matter what passions compose them, all private
worlds are good, they are never vulgar places: Dolly had been
made too civilized by her own, the one she shared with
Catherine and me, to feel the winds of wickedness that
circulate elsewhere: No, Dolly, the world is not a bad place. j
(51) !
166
But Collin is not telling the truth, for he has shown in his story that the
world is indeed a dangerous place because of the troublesome intersection of
public and private. Where the one dominates, damage is done to the other.
Finally, the novel is about authority: Verena’s authority, Dolly’s
appropriation of authority, the Judge’s lack of authority with the
townspeople, as well as Collin’s textual authority. It is about how
changeable and ambiguous this authority is as the fates and fortunes of the
characters mingle, rise and fade. As the novel ends, Verena is broken, Dolly
is dead, and Collin has departed.
* * *
The problem with much of the preceding analysis, of course, is that
while it pretends that the text is the locus of the study, much of the
discussion is really based on interpretation, and interpretation is something
the reader does. Even with my occasional use o f the passive voice ("the
passage could be viewed as . . .") or the use of the ambiguous first person
plural pronoun ("we know that . . ." or "we might assume that . . .") I have
not successfully omitted the reader. Nor can I; this analysis is done by one
of the readers. Different readers may view some of the analysis herein ,
quite differently. In other words, they may revoice the text in different ways
and the novel may have a much different meaning for them. The next
chapter examines how this might happen in readings of The Grass Harp.
167
Endnotes
1. See J. Atkinson and J. Heritage, Structures of Social Action: Studies in
Conversational Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984).
■ 2 . The style of this transcription has been altered from the original for
readability. Current styles of conversation transcription are much more
[explicit in terms of points of overlap, pausing, and the transcription of
disfluencies. For this particular transcription, spelling has been adjusted to
jconform as nearly as possible to pronunciation.
!3. For more on author-narrator distinctions, see Walter Gibson, "Authors,
[speakers, Readers, and Mock Readers" in Reader-Response Criticism: From
Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins (Baltimore: The
Ijohns Hopkins UP, 1980) 1-6; and Gerard Prince, "Introduction to the Study
of the Narratee," also in Reader Response Criticism (1980) 7-25.
168
CHAPTER SIX - The Voices of Readers
In its cryptic way, "the text speaks" finds the correct source for
the voice of narrative discourse: in the public conventions of
language, in relation to which the author is a facilitating
m edium -the text, once written, liberates itself from his act of
writing and "goes public." Language, transcending the individual,
imprints the text with the community’s values. And, without
contradiction, the reader is the producer of meaning, since he, as
much as the writer, is a repository of the culture’s linguistically
coded values, and has the power to release them from the text.
(Roger Fowler, Linguistics. 79-80)
Everything vital in the evaluative reception of another’s
utterance, everything of ideological value, is expressed in the
material of inner speech. After all, it is not a mute, wordless
creature that receives such an utterance, but a human being full
of inner words . . . The context of this inner speech is the
locale in which another’s utterance is received, comprehended,
and evaluated; it is where the speaker’s active orientation takes
place. (Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language.
118)
As I suggested in the last chapter, an analysis of power struggles j
!
among discourses in The Grass Harp lacks validity if applied without ]
i
I |
reference to reader(s) and reading(s). In fact, most of the discussion in the j
preceding chapter contains at least tacit references to readers and specific j
I
readings. A text may exist in and of itself, but meaning drawn from the j
! ;
text does not; any reading of The Grass Harp or any other text is always a j
particular reading. The reader brings her own discourse and knowledge of
discourses to bear when she reads and, if we accept the notion that
interpretations of both written and spoken discourse are always filtered <
169
through the ear of the listener, then any theory of language that excludes
reader and listener can be only a partial model of what actually transpires
as we read or listen. When the reader is fully admitted into the transaction,
those elements that make up her subjective world-her values, psychological
and social history and orientation, and her intuitive and experiential world
knowledge— determine how she revoices what she reads and how she
: perceives the discourse(s) she encounters in the text. j
In the course of the discussion that follows, I will draw upon
I
particular revoicings of The Grass Harp using protocols taken from actual 1
i
readers as they read. In all, I interviewed seven adult readers of varying ' J
i
1
reading backgrounds and competencies for the protocols. Two were "novice" j
adult readers, involved in tutorial programs run by Los Angeles area literacy !
projects; three were "expert" readers, that is, readers who read fluently and ;
I
i
often butTor whom reading is not the focus of their professions; and two |
were "expert professional" readers who were doctoral candidates in English
at the University of Southern California. I also took part, producing a
protocol for my reading o f the novel as well (as an expert professional),
i For the protocols, participants read selected passages from The Grass Harp.
both silently to themselves and aloud, commenting on their reading and
sense-making processes into a tape recorder as they read. Although I will
not attempt to claim that these protocols provide a "window into the mind"
during the act of reading, I will maintain that they provide insights into
170
i
| readers’ perceptions and opinions of how they read, both silently and aloud, j
land into the problems they encounter while reading.
'READER-TEXT CONFLICT
I In terms of the conflicts I laid out in Chapter 5, the reader-text
conflict may be one of the most important. In Chapter 4, I suggested that
the Iserian notion of the gap might be helpful in understanding the concept
of revoking. As the reader makes projections about a text that are based
1
on her own subjective understanding (including world knowledge, genre
knowledge, etc.), much may be at variance with the text a writer has
I
produced. A gap is effected by this variance, and it is in the negotiation of
this gap that meaning takes place. The text, Iser writes, "provokes
continually changing views in the reader" (167), which suggests the kind of
i
i
role the text plays in the transaction. In the present chapter, I argue that
the gap is not only the space in which this mediation or transaction occurs,
J but is also the ground on which the conflict between reader and text takes
place. The reader’s world view (including her personal or professional
history with texts) causes her to resist textual cues and potentially struggle
against a writer’s goals or even oppose them in order to accommodate her
own subjective position.
t
This is not the kind of struggle that is ever won or lost. Readers
generally read texts with a certain willingness to be changed, that is, to be
171
entertained, to learn, to involve themselves in the world of the text, or as
Iser might put it, to shift their projections to ones more symmetrical with
those of the text and its author. Winning or losing implies that one side
defeats the other or comes out ahead. In either position, there can be no
"real" communication because what transpires is one-sided; there may be
i
meaning but there is no communion.
What is "real" communication? Can a reader know if he has received
what is in the text or what the author has intended? Put another way, can
i
a reader know if he has "won," and dominated the text, and in so doing, i
j 4
imposed his own interpretation on a text, drawing from it whatever meaning i
he has chosen to draw whether it was there or not? In what situation is
the text the "victor," wherein the reader totally loses his Self in the act of
i reading, becoming subsumed, consumed, or completely lost? Furthermore,
i i
what would these situations look like? '
I
Taking a reader-response approach, I would argue these conditions
would not only be very difficult to untangle but also are of little utility.
I ;
Readers can only guess at an author’s intentions. Often the disjunction j
between a writer’s stated intentions for a text and the intentions that a
reader has inferred from that text is considerable. In addition, many writers
of literary fiction and poetry, cannot or will not— even when asked— articulate
i
; what their texts mean; they are often more intrigued by the variety of
!
^interpretations. Readers cannot examine texts objectively by simply
172
i
t
sloughing off their subjectivities. There is no ideal reader, no objective
reading. Thus, since "real communication" cannot be very explicitly defined,
we might instead search for the dynamics of control, as I proposed in j
I !
I Chapter 1. In this chapter, I focus specifically on these dynamics in terms
of how a reader engages (and controls) a text.
The type of reader/text conflicts I have been alluding to continue [
I
I throughout the reading activity, and are present even before a piece of
!
I
• writing is taken up to read. Readers have expectations and preconceptions
l
! ,
! about texts, and may already be biased about what they assume a writer will j
argue or present. Particular readers, for example, may have predilections
against certain kinds of literature that they believe to be much more
difficult to read than other kinds. The novice readers in the protocols of
I
The Grass Harp seemed especially intimidated by the fact that they were
reading "literature" for a study. One of these readers, Rita,1 feared she did
not have the expertise to wade through difficult and unfamiliar discourse
| and then sound intelligent enough to talk about it. Other readers— as I
found in a limited survey undertaken in 1989 of 10 expert readers— don’t
read "literature" for relaxation because it takes too much time and energy.
I
|
These readers select types of texts they feel will be less difficult and more
i
relaxing. Many readers who read for pleasure often do not attempt to read
j the so-called "literary classics" (such as Moby Dick or Vanity Fair) because
of the anticipated difficulty. For their spare time, they want relaxation; if i
173
they read, they want to read texts about which they don’t have to "think."
f
! Unfortunately schooling-and here I refer to the traditional high school
English Literature class--seems to promote a perception that there is a
certain way of reading literature.2 That "way" is neither easy nor
pleasurable but requires work and, for many, an ability they do not possess
or have lost over the course of intervening years. Thus, when many expert
readers read what they consider to be literary classics, it may very well be
with trepidation.
If readers still choose to read a difficult text (or are coerced into it),
they may struggle through at least the first few pages until they familiarize
themselves with the language or the genre. One of the expert professional
readers in the protocol, Martha, had trouble with the opening sentence of i
I
j Chapter 1 of The Grass Harp. She commented that the sentence "seems
pretty awkward and it made me pause, but after that, I kind of get a feel
for the Southern [in the passage]." By "Southern," she seems to mean the
i
Southern style of Truman Capote as the narration embodies it. On the
i
other hand, novice readers may struggle through the entire text, as both
novice readers seemed to do with The Grass Harp. Mary, for example,
seemed to read some sections of the selected passages with greater ease
i
than others. Once she moved beyond the opening sentences of the passage !
i i
i
i i
] and learned the discourse of The Grass Harp, she had an easier time,
174
reading faster and commenting less on her difficulties, until major decoding
problems reduced her reading fluency and confidence (more on this later).
I
The value systems that a reader brings to a text may result in other
kinds of conflicts. For example, a reader may dislike a character or a plot
i turn so intensely that it becomes an effort to continue reading or may result
I
in unconscious misreading. Expert reader H elen found it very bizarre that
Collin, The Grass Harp’s narrator, could lose both his parents in the space
I
of a few days and not seem to express any grief or loss. She comments:
[Collin] talks about getting good grades in school and stuff
which is anathema to what we read nowadays about how kids
respond to grief. This kid doesn’t— seems to be inured to all !
that, which is, I think, peculiar.
H elen puzzled over this for some time as she read and ultimately it affected
not only her sense of Collin, but the meaning of the passage as a whole, for j
j she brought it up again when reflecting back on the passage after having
I
completed it. The narrator’s lack of grief, she repeated at the end, was
"most peculiar." i
Finally, after finishing a text, a reader’s perception of that text may
i continue to evolve as he turns over in his mind the meaning he drew from
i
the text, or ideas that the text evoked in him. Expert reader Bob, when ;
questioned about the meaning of a passage a few days after reading it,
responded that although he could not recall the characters’ names (in this
case, Riley and Collin), he did remember how taken Collin was with Riley
175
!and how much Riley wanted to be like him. How much this was intensified
and altered during the interval between reading and recalling is difficult to
assess. However, to Bob this was the most salient part of a passage that
contained a variety of other events and descriptions. The meaning of any
'text inevitably undergoes changes in the reader’s subjective memory; the
events a reader recalls vary from reader to reader. Thus the meaning of a
text is continually being modified by experiences that transpire in a reader’s
life after the reading which serves to change his perceptions and subsequent
recollection of the text.
THE AUTHO R’S VOICE
l
I
I In the above discussion, I have tended to conflate text and author, not
i ' '
J
from any repudiation of the distinctions made by literary theorists between
text and author; on the contrary, I would argue that a text, to some degree
at least, exists apart from its author, making authorship~as I have suggested !
i
: earlier-a problematic concept. Texts have an implied author, whether there I
|
| is a close connection between the writer and an actual person or not. The
!
reader’s knowledge of the author as a composing entity or persona is
important to any reading of a text, and this entity may or may not
correspond to the person whose photograph appears on the dust jacket. For I
: example, there was a real Truman Capote, a person who actually lived, - i
i
^thought, and spoke, but the Truman Capote a reader comes to know
176
through the reading of The Grass Harp has a specific persona related to
that novel. This may be a persona with the same values as its narrator,
having, in the case of The Grass Harp, the same gentleness, empathetic
ability, and manner of speaking as Collin. In other words, the way Collin
speaks helps create for the reader an authorial persona. The image a
reader has of the real author may conflict with the image of the author J
t
created through the reading of that author’s text. For example, I knew who
Truman Capote was and had read a biography of him by Gerald Clarke.
Yet in the protocol of my reading of The Grass Harp. I made a distinction j
between that Truman Capote I had read about and seen in movies and
I
tmagazine photographs and the one who authored the novel I was reading.
But it is also just as possible that a reader who knows something about the j
i
personal life of Truman Capote will choose to construct the Capote persona i
of The Grass Harp with these other "real life" characteristics in mind.
j
; Expert reader H elen noticed the "Southern-ness" of an early narrative
passage of The Grass Harp, and her knowledge that Capote was a
Southerner apparently confirmed these impressions as she was reading. In a
later passage in which Collin describes a close friendship between Verena
i
I and another woman, H elen recalled Capote’s homosexuality, which suggested
to her that Verena Tnay have had homosexual feelings or relations with this J
other woman. In my reading, Capote’s legendary personality and flare for |
i
| extremes in style contrasted with the authorial image that emanates from the
I 177
reading of a story such as The Grass Harp, which is largely about ordinary
people living ordinary lives. I seemed to resist the outlandish Capote in
! favor of the Grass Harp Capote, instead of merely forgetting about it. The
I
construction of authorial persona, then, appears to be a complex and
i
(
agonistic combination of a reader’s world knowledge about that author and I
how she chooses to invoke that knowledge in a specific reading. |
! ' !
it also might affect a reader’s reading to know that the protagonist of j
The Grass Harp. Dolly, was modelled after a real person who Capote knew '
(Sook Faulk) and that the action in the novel was drawn in large part from
i
j Capote’s own childhood experiences. Here reality and the imaginary may
I
clash, resulting in a struggle between two ways of reading. Many readers
find pleasure in reading literature that has a close tie to events that have
j actually taken place, as if they have been afforded a direct view into the
I
{private lives of real people and are not simply an audience for some
i
invented, imaginary narrative. The reader is then a voyeur who may be |
I
constantly examining what is presented in the novel to confirm events from (
Capote’s life or gain insights into his behavior and that of other real people, j
I I
In this case, the reader is reading as much for information than for
aesthetics, even though that reader might be well aware that he is reading a
novel, t
; To summarize, the authorial image a reader encounters finds its !
1
i source, at least in part, outside the reading of the text, potentially creating a
conflict between what is generated in the act of reading and what is
generated by world knowledge.
I
REVOICING BETWEEN THE LINES
In addition to information and conjectures about the author and
[authorial persona, the reader brings to the text other forms of knowledge.
i 4
Some of this is linguistic in the form of tacit knowledge of conversational
structure and speech act rules, that is, how people speak to one another and
iwhat appropriate questions and responses are, according to situations and
| contexts. This knowledge helps the reader supply information that the
i
author doesn’t provide, enabling the reader to contribute what the writer
'Only implies. Readers also bring to the text a particular understanding of
human nature that informs their reading of characters and character
interactions. The readers of The Grass Harp indicated in different ways in
their protocols how they called upon this understanding as they tried to
[
i
make sense of the story as it unfolded. As several readers read a passage
where Collin reports briefly that his father, upon the death of his mother,
ran naked around the yard screaming, they speculated on why he might
! have done this. Mary, a novice reader, construes this action as a
j
I manifestation of anger: "Sounds like her [Collin’s] father was very angry
about the passing of his wife. Fortunate for him to get the emotions out."
Martha, an expert professional reader, tries to clarify the relationship
179
between Dolly and Verena based on Collin’s brief descriptions of them: |
"The introduction of Dolly makes me wonder. Sister? And then later when
it says they were gathering roots with Dolly, I wonder what is the
relationship." Collin’s narrative eventually confirms that they are sisters.
Readers draw upon both types of knowledge in the reading of literary !
dialogue, especially in cases where it is referred to indirectly. In The Grass
Harp, for example, readers make assumptions about what Dolly might be
i
feeling that she doesn’t say (or that Collin doesn’t report directly or j
indirectly). The lives of the characters are carefully regulated within the
textual boundaries by the author, but what makes the characters effective is
i
that they are shaped, at least in part, outside the text. What the reader I
supplies to flesh out their lives increases the number of dimensions !
inhabited by each character. Dolly, Verena, Catherine, Judge Cool, and
Riley all have virtual lives before the novel begins and after it ends.
Presumably, because they represent real people or prototypes of real people,
they have feelings, conversations, activities, and experiences that are not
specified in the novel, although they may be alluded to. They work
effectively as characters because they have all this extratextual "stuff"; in
this sense, the goals of the characters, desires, and personae extend out into
the space beyond the text, and this space is governed by the reader.
[
I
Although the revoking concept I am promoting in this study is
strongly aural, it is not without its visual analogue. The aural translations
180
readers make may evoke certain familiar images from their own experiences j
j
or pasts. The description of a landscape, for example, may result in the
recall of a landscape a reader might have seen. In fact, some readers may
ignore the textual description of that landscape, passing over phrases— even
whole passages— in a reading and in so doing, retain much of the image they
brought to the reading. Martha, for example, reported that one passage of j
i
Dolly, Collin et a t having a picnic in a tree house reminded her so much of ,
an experience of her own that she had trouble picturing Capote’s scene. In
this sense, readers recast what the author has written to fit their view of the
world. In other instances, a reader may alter the image he has of the
landscape to make a better fit with what the text is saying. In my protocol,
I reported that I had to keep revising my image of a field near the tree !
house to conform to new features that the narrator introduced as the story J
i
i
unfolded. I had imagined it as a wide grassy field with huge, leafy trees in
the background. I eventually had to run a road through the field and
construct a stream running through the trees, which appeared and
disappeared in my imagination as it became salient or unimportant in the
novel. i
j
VOICE AN D IDENTITY
In "Unity Identity Text Self," Norman Holland argues that
"interpretation is a function of identity" (123). When people have a new
181
jexperience, they recast it to find themselves in that experience. Reading is
jone of those kinds of experiences. Holland writes, "Each reader, in effect,
re-creates the work in terms of his own identity theme" (126). When
ireaders read, they revoice in their own words, modifying texts to be
I
Inscriptions of their own selves. They bring a text under their hegemony,
ishape it to their identities and understanding of the world, and even misread
it in order to make it meaningful or relevant to their lives.
Holland argues that unless we bring events and phenomena into our
experience in such a way that they become our own we cannot truly
understand. If we extend this to reading, it could likewise be argued that
1
J
readers do not truly understand a text unless that text is recast in such a
I
[way that readers actually become the writers. One unsettling consequence
involves situations in which a particular set of readers reads, writes, and
speaks a specific discourse. Linguist James G ee reports that working very
closely with a small group of other language theorists on the same issues in
literacy and applied linguistics has resulted in situations in which they seem
to be all freely using each other’s words and ideas.3 As G ee listens to one
of these colleagues give a paper at a Conference or reads another colleague’s
paper, he admits he often gets the feeling that the discourse the colleague
! uses is his. While this may be a case in which a discourse community is
j
! using a common language about current ideas, it may also be the result of
| .
: revoicing, and the symbiotic association between reading and writing.
182
Readers have, in a sense, "written" texts they read; they have revoiced its
i
tenets, its theories, its explanations, and its phraseology and transposed it |
into the imagery of their own world so that what they read is often !
disturbingly familiar to them.
In "Criticism and the Experience of Interiority," Georges Poulet writes
about the subjectification process that occurs in the act of reading. H e
argues that the " I" of the reader fuses with the speaking person in the text-- >
!
that speaking person being the hero of a novel, a character who reveals her I
inner thoughts, the narrator, or simply the persona bearing responsibility for
the propositions laid out in a piece of writing, fiction or nonfiction. Poulet
describes how the " I" invests itself within these entities:
Because of the strange invasions of my person by the thoughts
of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of j
thinking thoughts foreign to him. I am the subject of thoughts i
other than my own. My consciousness behaves as though it '
were the consciousness of another . . . Whenever I read, I !
mentally pronounce an I, and yet the J which I pronounce is not
myself. (44-45)
In other words, readers identify with the narrating " I," the central voice of
the text. They take on a second self which they "loan" to the text, thus
merging their subjectivity with the subjectivities that exist within that text.
This argument seems to coincide with many of the theories I have been
discussing and developing in the preceding chapters as well as my own
instincts about how I read. Furthermore, one could argue that this
phenomenon also occurs each time the first person pronoun T" appears in
183
the text, so that readers move from one speaking character to another,
applying a process of identification. The more information that is given
about a character in a text-in the form of a presentation of the speaker’s
*
thoughts, point of view, and speech-the stronger the annexation of
consciousnesses.
Consider the following passage from the end of The Grass Harp.
Collin and Verena are walking together.
"Verena, I want to go away."
We were at the garden gate; " I know. I do myself," she
said, closing her umbrella. "I’d hoped to make a trip with
Dolly. I wanted to show her the ocean." Verena had seemed a
tall woman because of her authoritative carriage; now she
stooped slightly, her head nodded. I wondered that I ever could
have been so afraid of her, for she’d grown feminine, fearful,
she spoke of prowlers, she burdened the doors with bolts and
spiked the roof with lightning rods. (96)
I
By Poulet’s argument the consciousness of the reader is appended to
Collin’s, the original and primary " I" of the text. Collin is the one making
I
observations, wondering about Verena. But I would argue that the moment
he reports Verena’s discourse, the moment she appears on the page with "I
know," her identity is adjoined to that of the reader, and the reader shifts
his " I" to hers, to her new frailty and tragedy as well as to her fears and
desire to go to the ocean, with which the reader now can empathize.
Admittedly, the reader’s annexation of Verena’s consciousness may be less
profound than an annexation of Collin’s, because a reader has less from her; ,
a reader knows less about her. The reader’s " I" may subsequently shift back
184
to Collin’s " I" as he resumes his reportage, as he recovers the " I" for
himself. Although Collin’s " I" dominates in much of the novel, the novel is
never his domain alone; in fact, each time he presents the " I" of another |
character in direct discourse, he loses some of his own speaking authority j
i
and stature. Thus, the subjective worlds engage and tangle, leeching power
from one another.
Readers have certain proclivities to identify with certain types of
characters and this selection may be highly personal. Readers may identify
with fem ale characters or with depressed characters or with emotional or \
i
I
intellectual types. Martha, for example, especially liked the Catherine
character and her "exoticism." The use of " I" invites any reader to identify;
it asks the reader to enter that subjectivity. Perhaps this identification is
what novice reader Mary meant when she said she felt "enveloped into the
story" or what expert professional reader Martha meant when she said of
Grass Harp character, Riley: i
I knew that not only did I like Riley and he remind me of
things from my childhood, but I liked him, the character, and
was engaged with him, the character, and felt a little bit like
Collin, as if my voice was his or his voice was mine.
i
QUOTATION MARKS j
t
Quotation marks used to enclose text may also affect the way that
text is revoiced as well as influencing the degree to which a reader
185
I
j
identifies with specific characters or speakers. Most commonly, quotation
marks serve as graphic markers, telegraphing to the reader that she is
reading directly-reported speech as distinct from the author’s or narrator’s
I
discourse. Some novelists, such as Grace Paley, do not regularly use
quotation marks but depend upon syntactic and lexical shifts in combination
'with page spacing conventions, such as paragraphing and indentation, to
mark reported speech. Quotation marks, however, are the standard marker
in English for quoted dialogue, and they have important consequences for
how the reader reads.
In "Reported Speech," Florian Coulmas writes about what is implied
by the use of quotation1 marks:
[T]he conventions for using quotation marks, for instance in
newspapers, are such that what is enclosed in quotation marks is
claimed to be a verbatim rendition of what a speaker said.
Direct discourse, in this understanding, means fidelity not only to
the content but also to the surface form of a reported utterance.
(U)
The implication that readers believe that writing enclosed by quotation
marks represents spoken language verbatim is problematic. Readers, even
competent readers, may or may not understand that it is only the speaker’s
claim that he is accurately reporting another’s speech. Readers often seem
1 to accept written language within quotation marks as speech faithfully
j written down. This assumption may be at the heart of a problem common
I
| in the print media in which a speaker who has been quoted finds that his
J-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
186
!words have changed their meaning by being lifted out of their original
context. But it is not only the context that has changed, but rather the fact
I
.that the quotation almost never contains exactly what was spoken in the
I . !
{manner it was said.
| In "Some of my Favorite Writers are Literate," Robin Lakoff points
i |
i
lout that language within quotation marks is not language that anyone would
! actually say; quotation marks do not enclose a precise duplication of actual
I I
i oral discourse. Theorists including Lakoff who have studied spoken j
f |
language point out that actual speech is replete with errors, stutters, fillers,
I
repetition, on-line editing and other disfluencies; this is not readily apparent j
i
to a listener.4 Listeners generally do not hear the stutters and the
I
I disfluencies in conversation because they attend primarily to what the
J i
speaker is saying. Listeners hear the errors only when these errors result in
| confusion for the listener, when a listener is specifically looking for them, or
I
i when the discourse is unusually disfluent, such as when the speaker is i
i
| afflicted with a chronic stutter. Because this disfluency is generally the
I result of the problems incurred in on-line production of language, it is
probably eliminated in a listener’s processing of spoken language he hears.
I
1 When I recall what the check-out clerk at the grocery store said yesterday, I
I do not normally recall it with the disfluencies, repetitions, or fillers intact.
f
, In fact, I probably wouldn’t recall that the clerk’s discourse was in any way j
i
disfluent even if it were. If long-term memory for spoken language excludes j
187
the inconsequential disfluencies, it would then follow that listeners accept
what is within quotations to be representations of speech, purified and
i edited as it is.
Based on readers’ expectations about voices and their experience of
oral speech— that each person’s voice is distinct and belongs to an individual
-and based on a literary competence that says that what is enclosed in
quotation marks is to be read as dialogue or as a voice distinct from other
I
voices, readers may revoice and understand what is in quotation marks quite
differently than the rest of the text. In the reading protocols of The Grass
Harp, novice, expert, and professional readers modulated and animated their
voices more when reading dialogue than when reading Collin’s descriptive
' passages. Quoted dialogue was given much more affect in terms of
i
intonation and stress change than narrative passages. And although difficult
to verify because all reading aloud was ultimately performed by the reader
using his own voice, I would argue that readers read dialogue of one
j character differently than that of another. If, as in a play, reading the
dialogue of a character invites at least a minimal amount of identification
with that character, it is possible that as readers read dialogue of the
characters, that identification results in at least subtle revoicing differences
from one character to the next.
t
j In a sense, reading aloud is a poor measure of these kinds of
l
^distinctions because it is a performance, and the readers are simply
188
responding to the theatrical aspect of this activity; thus these intonation
shifts may not necessarily occur in silent reading. But as I have argued in
I
previous chapters, the question of whether reading is ever "silent" (unvoiced)
is at issue. Furthermore, revoicing itself is a kind of performance for
oneself and involves a dramatization of the text and, hence, this same
increase in affect would also be reflected in silent reading (or revoicing) as
well. !
i |
j I
READER COMPETENCE '
!
Perhaps one of the most important reasons that readers interpret texts
differently is that readers have different competencies. One way of
i
acquiring reading competency is through traditional schooling. A reader {
with a high school education has presumably acquired certain skills and been j
exposed to at least a modest range of texts, including literary works. On
the other hand, a literature professor or literature graduate student has been
I !
!
i exposed to a much greater range of texts, especially in the domain of
jcanonical literature; a literature expert reads by profession. In addition, a
reader’s exposure to texts is influenced by the ways of reading that have
been privileged in her reading training. Students of literature are taught to
engage in a kind of reading of literary texts that involves a meta-critical
189 i
appreciation of the text and includes an examination of structure and form
I
I as they operate in conjunction with meaning. Both expert professional i
i !
readers in the protocol study utilized their reading training and their
background with texts in their reading of The Grass Harp. For example,
[Martha, as a graduate student interested in critical theory and feminism,
1 i
[commented frequently on the masculine and feminine aspects of the
characters and perceived much of the character interaction through the lens
i
of feminist theory. For example,
i
j And yet even then he [Collin/Capote] undercuts a traditional
gender rendering by talking about her totalling figures, turning
pages of letters. We’re talking about Verena who is completely,
with the virile eyebrows, very masculine indeed. The opposite
perhaps of Dolly. ;
[She also made comparisons with other novels and novelists, such as Harper |
[Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Martha also noted, however, that had she not been in the position of I
having to comment on her reading as she read or if she had been reading
for "pure pleasure," she probably would not have applied the feminist
analysis so rigorously. As I pointed out earlier, readers read for different
i
! reasons, varying not only from reader to reader but from reading to reading. |
] !
For readers who have acquired a number of different reading competencies, j
different ways of reading cease to be discrete; that is, a professional reader
|
i such as Martha would apply, if even on a subconscious level, literary
reading skills (involving critical analysis) to her pleasure reading. Her
familiarity with literary language and conventions and her confidence in her
own ability contribute to the way of reading and revoicing that she engages
in. I
'On a more focal level, the different skill level of the readers in the
study also resulted in different revoicings. Novice readers, because they are
less skilled at making predictions about words and sentences, seem to be
forced to pay much more attention to the phonological decoding of the text,
although even at this level and with this small sample of readers, the
i
strategies varied. Rita, for example, concentrated on reading every word, I
I
sounding out unfamiliar words and stopping to ask about words she didn’t j
J
understand. When she reread a passage aloud, she used minimal intonation,
except for falling pitch contour at the end of a sentence. She made no
intonational distinctions between narration and literary dialogue. Her
reading contained very few pauses. Upon reflection, after having read
several passages (one silently and aloud), she seemed neither to enjoy her
reading nor to feel very confident that she had understood very much of
I
anything that she read. Although she decoded almost every word accurately
and there were a few instances in the passage she read that made her
chuckle, she also seemed to feel very remote from what was going on in the :
i
story. Likewise, she seemed to have very little sense of the narrator or that i
j
there even was a narrator, although she could identify the characters.
191
Mary’s strategy, on the other hand, was to pursue global
comprehension; she skipped words she could not easily decode or
understand. This has two results. One was that she appeared to enjoy the
text more than Rita; she talked about identifying with the characters and
liking the narrative descriptions; she was able to engage in some analysis as
to why certain characters did what they did. But she also misunderstood
what other readers might construe as major elements of the novel. For
example, Mary felt the narrator Collin was a female, and suggested that the
narrator might be Dolly. In one paragraph, she could not understand a key
word, "squirrel" and therefore felt frustrated when so much of the paragraph J
seemed to revolve around an understanding of this word. Also, when Mary
read a passage aloud after having read it to herself, she commented that she
enjoyed the passage far less than when she read the passage silently. Mary
explains:
I can read to myself and it’s fine. I’ve always resisted reading
out loud because I feel like someone’s watching me and I’ll be
criticized and I’m not going to be telling the story right. [When
I read silently to myself] I read more me into it, instead of
reading what is written on paper. I feel like I read a different
story the second time around [when I reread a passage aloud].
Part of enjoyment has to do with confidence level. As a novice reader,
Mary’s confidence is not high, but she does utilize strategies that more
confident readers employ as they read. She becomes frustrated when her
I
lack of skill sabotages her global reading strategies. On the other hand, her
global reading strategies enable her to involve herself more in the text, to
become a voice herself and participate on both a literal and metaphoric
level in the "writing" and revoicing of the text. Because she is a novice, she
misreads more textual cues than expert or professional readers, perhaps
causing her to come to different conclusions than she would if she
understood key words and phrases. This makes her understanding of the
text less satisfying than if she had understood all or most of the text, but
nonetheless she seemed to experience some enjoyment from her way of
reading. The expert and professional readers also made errors although far
fewer. Sometimes, if these errors led to confusion, these readers were quick
to notice them and make adjustments; other times they simply made sense
of the passage, error intact.
Expert readers were also more skilled at looking for clues to help j
them understand:^ The gender of the narrator, for example is not revealed
in the first few pages of the novel. But Martha, for example, spoke about
looking for evidence to determine Collin’s gender, but with a willingness to
I
be kept guessing for the time being.
We see Dolly is a character that the protagonist really enjoys, or
the narrator at least. And here, I think they were very much in
love . . . and of course this, a typical young man’s perception. I
assume it’s a man but it need not be.
When Collin introduces himself more explicitly, she quickly adapts.
193
Ah, it is a man. Collin Fenwick. It seems to me to be pretty i
autobiographical, too, if we’re talking about Truman Capote and
his age, a runt.
Martha not only makes the shift to viewing the narrator as a man, but
makes other connections as well, for example to the author.
4 * * ^ ' f
As I argued in Chapter 4, reading aloud is not the same as the
revoicing that goes on when reading to oneself. The skilled readers in the
protocol appeared to read so fluently, however, that when they read aloud, j
- ■ ■ i
the additional cognitive load of having to decode every word plus the j
performance aspect of reading aloud did not inhibit their understanding or
personal enjoyment of the text. In fact one reader, Bob, liked reading
aloud better because he liked the way the words sounded, especially the
colloquial language of Collin; he enjoyed "listening" to himself read, which is |
a particularly vivid instance of a reader translating the textual cues that
represent another voice into his own voice in the act of revoicing.
I have been careful in this chapter to avoid taking a position on the
problem of misreading and to abstain from advocating that any reading is a
legitimate reading. My "discussion in this chapter, however, does rely on the
conviction that any voice is a legitimate voice. The intent of this chapter
has been to investigate the voice that readers use to read and understand
texts and to show how different readers use that voice differently in reading
i
(and revoicing). Thus, once again, voice is relocated with the reader where j
the textual conflicts detailed in Chapter 5 are all, ultimately, played out. ;
194
In the next chapter, I will build upon this and previous chapters to
investigate some of the political and pedagogical ramifications for revoicing,
especially in the composition classroom, where the voice has become such a
potent and pervasive metaphor.
Endnotes
1. All the names of the participants in the reading protocol of The Grass
' Harp have been changed. All comments were tape recorded with
[participants’ permission. Punctuation has been added and disfluencies
Jomitted where such changes would facilitate understanding a transcription.
The appendix contains the complete protocols.
2. See also Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the
Teaching of English (New Haven: Yale UP, 1985) 1-17.
3. Personal communication.
4. There have been a number of studies on disfluency, notably: B.
Butterworth & F. Goldman-Eisler, "Recent Studies on Cognitive Rhythm" in
Of Speech and Time. Eds. A. Siegman & S. Feldstein (Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, 1979) 211-224; F. Goldman-Eisler "The Distribution of Pause
Durations in Speech," Language and Speech 4 (1961) 323-37; F. Goldman-
Eisler, Psycholinguistics: Experiments in Spontaneous Speech (London:
Academic P, 1968); and F. Goldman-Eisler, "Pauses, Clauses and Sentences",
Language and Speech 15 (1972) 103-13.
195
CHAPTER SEVEN - Authenticity, Authority and the Student Voice
For teaching, I have mostly one voice, one style: my power is
wrapped up in that. If I want power, I have to use my voice. If I
want to use some voice or style that I find more pleasing, I’m free to
do so, but I can’t have power that way. Yet--the crucial next step in
the notion— I am not trapped for life in one voice or style. I can
grow or change. But nol unless I start out inhabiting my own voice
or style. If I do that, then I can grow or change and start to use
other voices or styles-slowly. In short, I need to accept myself as I
am before I can tap my power or start to grow. (Peter Elbow,
Embracing Contraries. 202)
Student texts have often been considered texts on the margins of
written discourse. As Louise Phelps points out in Composition as a Human !
t - !
Science, they are the "other” texts, regarded neither as examples of ;
literature nor genuine academic writing and thus not worthy of serious j
study; certainly student texts have not been deemed as writing one should j
form a discipline around. They are the products of novices who are
practicing to become writers, or, more precisely, expert writers; thus student
texts are a means to an end and as such are merely rehearsals, preliminary
\
to the actual performance. Whether or not this "means to an end" is worth
studying is the principal argument of Phelps’s book and has become the
fulcrum of debate in English departments over the value of composition as
a legitimate field of study. I do not intend to enter the fray in this chapter. ;
« - :
i
i
I do, however, base this chapter on the conviction that student texts are
worthy of study and that the approaches to writing that students take— and
196
are encouraged to take by their instructors-have far-reaching effects and
implications. Furthermore, interpretive strategies that are applied to literary
i
'texts can be equally revealing when applied to student texts. As a metaphor
that has been applied to literary, academic, and student writing, voice is a
particularly fitting example. Furthermore, because voice is one of the
dominant metaphors employed in composition classrooms as a tool both for
textual interpretation and for pedagogy, it necessarily shapes the ways in
t
which students learn about texts and, as a consequence, about the world.
Hence, voice, in particular, has epistemological, political, and social
ramifications and is deserving of much more critical study than it has
heretofore received.
I
Both instructors and theorists in the composition field appropriate the
metaphor in different ways and put it to different uses. Thus, I do not
intend to be comprehensive in my critique of voice in the composition
classroom. I will examine a few of the central themes and figures
employing what I call the "pedagogy of voice," but I will focus my discussion
on Peter Elbow, one of voice’s most articulate and outspoken proponents,
and will ultimately suggest that there may be better interpretive tools,
i Peter Elbow, one of several prominent compositionists to examine
I voice in student texts, admits to having difficulty characterizing it, although
j * *
his books and many of his articles deal at length with voice and with
strategies for accessing it and putting it into one’s writing. His lack of
197
success at defining it notwithstanding, he does claim to know what real voice
"sounds like" and to be able to recognize it in written texts. While literary
theorists seem to regard voice in a way that has only an implied connection
to the speaking voice, compositionists, especially Elbow, make this
connection explicit, important because it figures in the way authentic voice is
recognized. In his book Writing With Power. Elbow opens his chapter on
voice with poet Robert Frost’s proclamation that the only thing that can
save sentences from being dry and lifeless is a "speaking tone of voice
somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of
the imagination to hear" (Elbow 281). A reader doesn’t "understand" a
voice or "imagine" a voice; a reader hears a voice, and, for Elbow, the
"heard" voice is the voice of the author. The metaphor presumes an
integration between speaking and writing as if the two modes can and
should be conceptualized in the same way. This incorporation of speech
into one’s written language is an important concept, for it underlies a
pedagogy that insistently privileges the speaking voice in the classroom.
In Elbow’s classroom, voice is accessed through exercises designed to
help the writer recognize and utilize his speaking voice in his writing. The
student engages in freewriting, a free-flowing excursus in which the student
writes rapidly, resisting the impulse to stop, evaluate, or edit. Freewriting is
writing for oneself, without a reader, and perhaps the most crucial part of
this exercise is its deliberate lack of regard for an audience. A freewriter
198
uses any words or phrases that materialize in his head; he may use
colloquial language or slang; he may write in incomplete sentences or codes
that have meaning only to him. There are no rules.
In the absence of a readership, this type of exercise ostensibly frees
the writer to write with much less inhibition, implying a style that has little
regard for an audience; it does not have to make sense except perhaps (and !
only perhaps) to the writer; it is informal in lexicon and syntax; and it is
open-ended thematically and stylistically.
i
There are several problems with this particular use of freewriting.
First, it assumes that if we write down what pops into our heads, we are !
I
writing down speech or something that is speech-like. However, as I argued
in the previous chapters, the moment that we transcribe speech into written 1
i
language, it ceases to be entirely speech-like. It loses its immediate context; !
!
it loses intonation, stress, pitch, and other linguistic features; it loses
paralinguistic features such as body language and eye contact between the
f
-i
speakers; it loses the kinds of verbal disfluencies, accents, repetition, and |
false starts that result from the limited on-line production capabilities of oral !
language. These kinds of disfluencies, while they hold no propositional
meaning for the hearer, exert varying degrees of influence over how that
message is perceived and hence do affect the meaning.
Elbow’s pedagogy also implies that we are less concerned with an !
i
audience when we speak than when we write, which, of course, is l
199
questionable (as Elbow would probably agree). When we speak, we usually
have our listener in front of us and can attend to a real person. In writing,
we write to an imagined person or persons and usually have less control
over who reads our written text or when.
For reasons that are not always clear, Elbow argues that writing that
is done strictly for an audience is fake and inevitably sounds dull and
lifeless. "People often avoid [real voice] and drift into fake voices," Elbow
explains, "because of the need to face an audience. I have to go to work, I
have to make a presentation. I have to teach, I have to go to a party"
(Writing With Power 306). Out of desperation, writers then use imitative
voices that are pre-packaged for a designated audience and leave out the
real voice. To get at that voice, according to Elbow, a writer should write
a great deal and very frequently without an audience, with the ultimate goal
of getting one’s writing to sound like one’s speech.
Elbow’s freewriting and his emphasis on autobiographical journal
writing may serve to reduce a student’s anxiety about writing for an
audience, especially writing for readers such as teachers. Teachers are
especially intimidating because they are the experts in those discourse
communities in which the student is still a novice. But more important,
these strategies are attempts to get students to make use of the language
they speak, presumably because this is the language with which they feel so
much more confident; they are experts at speaking (although, significantly,
200
they are not experts at speaking in academic contexts). The confidence
translates into authority for Elbow, which in turn confers power. Powerful
writing, according to Elbow, is writing that "sounds" like the writer. It has
resonance, and resonance is most apparent in spoken language where the
author’s presence is most manifest. An empowered student is one who has
worked to allow that personal voice to operate in all of her writing. Hence
spoken language is again privileged as having ultimate presence.
Elbow’s arguments serve to reinstitute the traditional dichotomy of
spoken language and written language I criticized earlier. But there is a j
more pernicious danger in investing in such a dichotomy for the composition '
classroom in that it misleads students, lulling them into false sense of power
and confidence. It does so in two ways. First, because it asks students to
i
tap into what comes naturally to them, Elbow’s program seems to validate
what students naturally feel, say, and write. This can be very liberating to a
student for whom writing well seems a great ordeal, almost a foreign
language, because she hasn’t yet managed to gain control of another
seemingly alien discourse. Second, and related to this, is the supposition
t
that every person has a powerful voice and simply needs to learn how to
put it into his/her written work. The beauty of it is that any person can do
I
it; all students can make their writing-whatever writing they do— resonate
with the sounds of their Selves, with their own individuality. As such, the j
program seems intoxicatingly democratic. i
201
Unfortunately, speaking a language is not a very democratic activity.
We are born outside discourses, first as infants without language at all.
Children must learn a native language, largely that of parents and siblings.
As they mature and acquire language, they find themselves outsiders to
I
register variations; they must learn what discourse is appropriate when and
where. For example, children learn that how they speak to their parents is
different from how they speak to siblings. They learn the difference
between baby talk and adult talk. As children develop, they find themselves
outsiders to the discourse beyond the family, to stranger talk or school talk.
They almost constantly encounter alien discourses, some of which they will
want to gain access to and can easily do so and others that-depending on
who they are (having to do with gender, race, socioeconomic status, age,
etc.)— they can gain access to only with great difficulty. Women, for
example, have trouble entering discourse communities dominated by men—
even when they know the discourse-just as men have problems entering
communities controlled by women. Similarly, as Shirley Brice Heath and
others have pointed out, the social interactions that surround a child in that
child’s upbringing (interactions such as story-telling, reading and responding,
and ways of using language, both oral and written) affect that child’s ability
to successfully negotiate institutional discourses, such as school discourse.
Powerful discourse communities, set on preserving their power and status,
202
are reluctant to allow outsiders in; some outsiders may never gain access to
certain communities for they will never be allowed to learn the discourse.
To teach students that their oral discourse is the single most important
element to their empowerment in writing puts the students in a predicament,
for when they rely on spoken language to grant them authority in writing,
they will most likely fail. "Voice," Elbow argues, "is what most people have
in their speech but lack in their writing-namely a sound or texture— the
sound of ‘them’" (288). But getting "themselves" into the texts they write j
will not necessarily grant students the authority they will need to succeed in
academic discourse.
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A similar and related use of voice for student empowerment comes
from critical pedagogy and its proponents. Critical pedagogists, notably J
Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Peter McClaren and Roger Simon argue that
student empowerment occurs in situations where the instructor helps the ;
student understand her own disempowerment and encourages her to utilize
her own voice in her own education with the goal of being able to shape
her own world and throw off the forces of repression that merely maintain
the power of the status quo. But as Elizabeth Ellsworth has argued in her
controversial essay, "Why Doesn’t This Feel Empowering?" (1989), critical
pedagogists consistently put the teacher in the pivotal position of facilitating j
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a student’s empowerment. The problem with this is that the teacher is still
in the position of control. Teachers themselves come to the classroom with
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particular discourses, ideologies, and agendas, some which they are unaware
of because these predispositions have not been critically examined. They
are in no position to evaluate whether or not the student is using his
"authentic" voice because their conception of "authenticity" in voice will
always be influenced by these predispositions. Yet this type of evaluation,
Ellsworth argues, is precisely what critical pedagogists do. If that voice is
I
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not reacting in appropriate ways against repression— usually defined by the
teacher— then the student is aligning herself with those forces and helping to
perpetuate them. Although problematizing the use of student voice in
critical pedagogy is too complex to give it adequate treatment here, part of
the critique that Ellsworth gives is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia
argument, described in an earlier chapter. Ellsworth argues that critical
pedagogy
[fails to] engage with the fact that the particularities of historical
context, personal biography, and subjectivities split between the
conscious and unconscious will necessarily render each
expression of student voice partial and predicated on the
absence and marginalization of alternative voices. It is
impossible to speak from all voices at once, or from any one,
without traces of the others being present and interruptive. (312)
A student’s voice already consists of a plurality of voices that are outgrowths
of the student’s experience in the world; these voices stem from gender,
V
race, class, and subjective experience that are often conflicted and
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conflicting. Thus using one’s own voice at all is a highly ambiguous activity,
much less using it in a classroom where the teacher calls upon a student to j
204
use her voice in a particular way for a particular reason associated with the
I
teacher’s goals for the class or students.
Similarly, in Elbow’s pedagogy, the teacher is the one in the position
I
jto recognize whether or not the student is using her authentic voice. I have
not found in Elbow’s writing any instances where he evaluates his own voice
and how it is formed by prevailing ideology and his position in the academic
community. Thus, to say that he can recognize voice in student writing j
when he reads it is merely to say that he recognizes the voice he is looking
for, or even his voice or his kind of voice, in a student’s writing.
Elbow’s argument is not without persuasive detractors, among them
David Bartholomae. In his article "Inventing the University," Bartholomae
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promotes strategies designed to encourage students to engage in the
discourse of academic writing and to "reinvent themselves" within the rules
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of that discourse. If students trap themselves in their own private and
idiosyncratic language, they effectively shut themselves out of academic
discourses because they fail to understand and learn the conventions. Citing
Roland Barthes’s S/Z . Bartholomae argues that "a writer does not write
(and this is Barthes’s famous paradox) but is, himself, written by the j
languages available to him" (143). The writer acquires power, Bartholomae j
continues, by situating himself within a discourse and shaping it in ways that *
are new or original (150). ;
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What Elbow presumes to be authority in student texts may not be
writing that "sounds" like the writer at all. It may be something quite
different because it does not arise from the writer’s speaking voice, but
rather from a skill— and this is a learned skill just as language is a learned j
skill-at creating an ethos. As I have argued, creating an ethos has a great j
deal to do with a writer’s ability to marshal other discourses or, in other
words, to control the "languages available to him," not in any new or
4.
original way as Bartholomae argues, for I think this is missing the point, but
in ways that are persuasive, that have the ability to move an audience, to
change viewpoints, and alter attitudes. "New" and "original" thinking is not
necessarily a source of power; I’m not even sure there is such as thing.
Without the managerial abilities, the skill at controlling and shaping the
■
discourses-one’s own and those of Others for others-n e w and original
thinking, even if it is possible, is useless.
For a person to write in such a way that the text resonates with the
sound of oneself or to write to find oneself or discover one’s identity, as
William Coles has argued in Composing: Writing as a Self-Creating Process.
is a very inward-turning phenomenon. While they do not form a coherent
group or espouse interchangeable pedagogies, Elbow, Coles, Ken Macrorie,
and Donald Murray are proponents (among others) of what James Berlin
has called "expressionist" rhetoric (Rhetoric and Reality. 73-81). These are
also the theorists for whom voice is most attractive as a metaphor; the
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hallmark of expressionist rhetoric is the writer writing to express himself or
using his own voice.
Expressionist rhetoric, however, potentially results in what Linda
Flower calls "writer-based" prose. Writer-based prose is the writer writing
for himself. In her article, "Writer-Based Prose," Flower takes to task the
"think it/say it" model of composition, which, she feels, encourages the
writer to write for herself by herself and to make very little effort at
transforming her own language for a reader. A text characteristic of writer-
based prose has less fully-developed arguments and the kinds of abbreviated
ifiem es and language not unlike inner speech described by Vygotsky (See j
Chapter 3). The writer is self-absorbed and fails to consider that the reader
needs to be guided through the writer’s discussion or argument. There are '
also particular genre conventions that need to be adhered to. One type of
essay in linguistics, for example, has a specific generic structure, which is
usually a variation on the following: introduction to the problem or i
hypothesis (often including an abstract), discussion of relevant literature on
the topic, an actual study, discussion, conclusion and implications). This is i
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at variance with many other kinds of academic essays both in the humanities |
and in the sciences.
When Coles writes that learning to write is "the chance to work out in
your own terms and for yourself what it means to see yourself as a
composer of your own reality" (1), he is advocating a view of writing that is
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primarily writer-based, where audience has a secondary role. While
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"audience" plays an important function in the concept of writing espoused by
both Elbow and Coles, their predominant theoretical base assumes the
priority of the speaker (and secondarily, for Elbow, the writer), and to some !
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extent this is also true of Bartholomae, especially when he urges student
writers to "reinvent themselves" in academic contexts. !
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Roland Barthes, in his discussion of textual interpretation in S/Z.
makes distinctions between the readerly text and the writerly that help
explain the writer-based focus of Elbow, Coles and others and puts this
emphasis in the historical context of traditional literary studies: ;
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Our literature is characterized by the pitiless divorce which the |
literary institution maintains between the producer of the text j
and its user, between its owner and its customer, between its
author and its reader. This reader is thereby plunged into a
kind of idleness— he is intransitive; he is, in short, serious:
instead of functioning himself, instead of gaining access to the
magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing, he is left with I
no more than the poor freedom either to accept or reject the
text: reading is nothing more than a referendum. Opposite the
writerly text, then, is its countervalue, its negative, reactive,
value: what can be read, but not written, the readerly. (4)
The writerly text is the text in which the reader is also writer, an active
participant in the perpetual process of meaning-making. Like Flower,
X
Barthes is also talking about the production of texts, although he situates
"production” at the point of interpretation, or in the act of reading, with the
full involvement and participation of the reader. Thus Flower’s reader-
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based prose, that is, prose written for a reader, results in Barthes’s writerly
text, or text "written" or "written again" (rewritten) by the reader.
W. Ross Winterowd points out another serious problem with Elbow’s
approach in "A Philosophy of Composition." He argues that the "Romantics"
(which include Elbow, Coles, and Macrorie) relegate the "craft" of writing to
an entirely subsidiary role while elevating such abstractions as "resonance."
Winterowd points out that this is much like giving the student "a book on
cabinetmaking with no illustrations, no suggestions about materials, and no
explanations of techniques" (343). Although Elbow, Coles and others want
language that is alive, vigorous, and imbued with the writer’s personal voice,
they do not indicate how this translates into style and what this might look
like in writing. Winterowd calls this kind of thinking "Romantic solipsism."'—
In the many Romantic discussions of voice, I have never found
anything to help me understand just what they mean, and I
suspect that this failure to explain a concept that is so important
has two reasons: first, a reluctance to tamper with the "mystery"
and, second, a distrust of empiricism. (345-6)
For Peter Elbow writing is a mysterious business and it is best to leave the
mystery alone since the only alternative he perceives is to resort to rules
and formulae. Student writers, however, are left to suffer the consequences.
AUTHENTICITY AN D AUTHORITY
In his article "Adam’s Language and Allah’s Language: Sincerity and
Authenticity," George Yoos calls attention to what he considers to be one of
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the crucial problems confronting writers, that of creating an authentic or
sincere ethos. Yoos locates the problem partly in the revision process,
arguing that the fact that writers revise their texts before their work is ever
read contributes to a lack of authenticity because revision reduces (or
"revises") a text’s original authenticity. Yoos explains:
It is the disjunction between the author’s voice in composition
and an awareness of the efforts imagined that took place in the i
revisions that suggests that a written text falsifies its voice. It is I
an awareness of the disjunction that makes voice in writing
inherently unstable and open to the criticism of an insincere or
an inauthentic voice. (3)
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Because a writer revises, he risks losing his "real voice" or his "true self." ;
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This also seems to be the underlying predicament facing writers as Elbow |
sees as it and why he is so insistent about injecting the speaking voice into \
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every text. Writing without the sense of a speaking voice is inauthentic and
therefore, for Elbow, powerless. If, as I have argued, the incorporation of
one’s speaking voice into7 one’s writing is a dubious enterprise, is there then {
no authentic ethos in written discourse? Furthermore, should authenticity
even be an issue? j
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Yoos makes a distinction between the sincere ethos and the authentic
ethos. A sincere ethos acquires the trust of its audience while the authentic
ethos "displays to the audience the basis of the rhetor’s own self-confidence
in what he or she is saying" (30-31). The authentic speaker makes the
audience aware of his own coming to terms with himself. Clearly many of ;
1
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Yoos’s concerns, much like those of Plato, have to do with ethics, or how
people relate to one another. Although Plato was not concerned with
authenticity, his solution to the ethical dilemma of an immoral speaker was
to dismiss rhetoric (and poetry, for similar reasons) from his Republic. It
was the only ethical solution because rhetoric is not really about ethics; it is
about persuasion. A rhetor may or may not be an ethical person, but it
does not effect his ability to persuade, hence he is potentially quite
dangerous.
But it is worth taking a second look at the claim that speakers reveal
their authenticity and sincerity more easily than writers. The example of .
the sophistic oratory, discussed in Chapter 2, would certainly provide a
counter to this claim. In contemporary society, where authenticity has
become an issue, there are countless examples of political oratory where the
speaker who sounds authentic and sincere is later exposed and shown to be
inauthentic and insincere or, more baldly stated, a liar. This has occurred to
such an extent in American politics that very few audiences really believe
anything a politician says, however they might like to. In fact, those who
listen to public speeches are granted no more insight as to the sincerity or
authenticity of the speaker than are readers of texts. Today’s oratory
usually comes to us rehearsed or already written; speakers on the television
read the teleprompter; radio speakers read prepared speeches that are often,
as Yoos reminds us, written by someone other than the speaker. Thus,
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while it may be easier to tell if the speaker is being sincere and authentic in
private conversation where the discourse is produced ad hoc, authenticity, it
appears, is something that the listener or reader confers that may have no
basis in the actual integrity or authenticity of the speaker. A speaker
coming to terms with himself may be all part of the show.
How much do authenticity and sincerity really count, and what does
this mean for Elbow’s composition student? The question is not whether
the writer can be trusted or not, or whether the writer is being herself or
not. If the goal of rhetoric is primarily hegemonic, that is, enjoining of the
reader, at least temporarily, to yield to the speaker’s control whether it be
in political oratory, newspaper editorials, novels, or poems, then we need
rather to consider how and if the reader uses trust as a criterion for
allowing the speaker to exert this control. If trust and confidence in an
author’s authenticity and sincerity are not chief considerations, what are?
The answer to this question could lie in the nature of authority, and the
' establishment of that authority, I would argue, comes largely in the way
discourses are managed, including the readers’ discourses. This ability to
marshal discourses can result in power, and it is only remotely contingent
upon the creation of a sincere or authentic ethos.
Because we are dealing with student writing in this chapter, it may be
productive to look at the handling (or mishandling) of authority in student
texts. One of the problems that upper level composition students have is
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the appropriate incorporation of other discourses into their own texts. The
most conspicuous manifestation of this is the management of quoted
material, cited authors-usually authors who are more proficient at writing
than the students are-and cited texts. The following is an excerpted section
of an essay written by a college freshman at the University of Southern
California in response to a question on gender roles in the university
environment. This is a revised paper. The student begins by quoting from
an essay by Sarah J. McCarthy entitled "Why Johnny Can’t Write":
1
"If we are to gain control of our lives and minds, we must first j
acknowledge the degree to which we are not now in control. We
must become reasonable and skeptical," states Sarah J. McCarthy.
Some people like Sarah McCarthy believe that we need more
"Squeaky Wheels" in our society. "Squeaky Wheels," defined as noisy
creative individuals who oppose authority. These individuals are
needed in society, but only to a minor degree ....
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First, the contrast between the expertise in McCarthy’s quoted material and
the student’s inexpertise is quickly apparent. The student’s writing lacks the
complex sentence structure that McCarthy’s prose manifests. The student
has problems adhering to the conventions of academic prose in the
capitalization of "Squeaky Wheels" and in the use (probably unintentional) of
a sentence fragment. The contrast in itself undermines the student’ s
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authority while increasing that of McCarthy. McCarthy is the expert
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syntactically in the above passage. j
But even more important is the way in which the material is
presented. This is the opening paragraph to a paper in which the student
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attempts to treat McCarthy’s article critically— a worthy academic enterprise-
but even in the first few sentences of his own positioning, the student writer
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undermines his own authority several times. "Some people like Sarah
McCarthy" illustrates the student’s doubt about the pervasiveness of
McCarthy’s point of view. H e could have used "Many people" but he may
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not have been certain of the accuracy of this statement. Or he simply could
have said "Sarah McCarthy believes," but again he doesn’t seem to be sure
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he is setting up a serious enough antagonist for his paper. H e then allows j
for her position, an effective rhetorical tactic, but comes back with a
qualifier, "only to a minor degree," which seems to indicate an inclination to
sidestep the issue or at least avoid directly confronting McCarthy’s argument, j
The alternative, "not to the degree that McCarthy believes," would introduce
a more courageous and authoritative engagement with McCarthy’s discourse ;
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and argument. Already, the student writer is displaying his lack of authority I
in the face of another writer whose authority has been confirmed if only by
the fact that McCarthy’s article is assigned reading for the course.
The problem in the above example is not that the student is being
inauthentic or insincere. H e does disagree with McCarthy; most readers
\ypuid probably believe he is being authentic. But he is an amateur at
i
constructing an authoritative ethos: he hasn’t sufficient skill to control the 1
discourse of another writer. H e also has problems at controlling academic
214
discourse conventions as well. Potentially both distance readers and fail to
induce them to grant the writer any power.
The student would not be helped in this case by drawing upon his
spoken language competency. In fact, the use of a sentence fragment could
arguably have been the result of the student’s dependence upon his spoken
language experience, resulting in a failure to make the necessary adjustments
to academic discourse. In this case above, it hurts him severely in terms of
power.
The following passage is from a paper written by another college
freshman in response to an assignment that asks the student to evaluate his
own educational experience in terms of Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy and
Freire’s critique of the "banking concept" of education. This excerpt is from
1
the middle of the student’s essay:
Some critics would argue that [teacher/student equality] would be
good for small children because they could experience life first hand
but, children would not seek out the skills, such as reading and
writing, that are necessary for one to function in society. Robert
Fulgham once wrote a book - All I Really Need to Know I Learned
in Kindergarten. These skills, such as reading, writing, basic math,
and proper social behavior, are taught through a banking system of
education and young children only learn them when they sit down and
listen to the teacher.
Again, the surface level errors subvert the writer’s authority, marking him as
a novice. H e also fails to incorporate the book reference into his own
discourse, presenting the title but giving no clear indication what the
argument of the book is or how he is using that argument to further his
215
own claim. The problem in both of the above passages is that the writers
fail to appropriate or "own" the other discourses and hence are unable to
amass any authority for themselves.
THE MANAGERIAL ETHOS
In her article "The Voice of Authority," Shirley K Rose proposes an
alternative to the voice metaphor, one that involves the audience to a much
greater extent. Her alternative is a model based on levels of authority.
Beginning with the premise that authority implies authority over someone or
something, Rose analyzes the rhetorical tasks that students are commonly
asked to confront (reporting or describing, analyzing, persuading to behave
or act) and shows how these different tasks require different levels of
negotiation for authority. She argues that an essay that reports an event,
for example, is less demanding in terms of assuming an authoritative stance
than analyzing facts or events, because in reporting or describing, the writer
is less interested in changing the reader’s mind. In analysis, the reader
argues for a specific point of view or interpretation, which requires more
negotiation for authority than reporting but less than persuading a reader to
believe or act (113-114).
It may be helpful to consider the question of negotiation for authority
in texts on at least two levels. The first is within texts and entails a
negotiation for control over the discourses of others within that text; the
216
second is the negotiation with the reader. These are not separate
operations, and the one simultaneously influences and modifies the other, as
should be obvious from the following discussion. In addition, both present
similar problems and involve similar strategies for resolving their problems,
among them an elaborate assortment of cuing devices.
In earlier chapters I looked at ways in which writers negotiate the
discourse of others within their texts. Here, using Rose’s model as a point
of departure, I would like to examine this same interaction in terms of
power and authority. We have seen, for example, some of the ways in
which writers cite other writers. Writer A may describe the position of
Writer B in paraphrase or summary, in which case some of the important
negotiation for power with writer B has already occurred before the writing
is on the page. Writer A has determined what is important in that text,
what he wants to use, what he needs to use to serve his own ends. Unless
a reader is familiar with the cited material, she cannot be certain what ideas
or discourse are those of Writer A and what are Writer B’s, or even if the
interpretation is one that she would agree with or not. Paraphrasing and
summarizing are difficult cognitive skills which require a reader to be able
to analyze a text and isolate essential or central messages or arguments.
Hence, this is a negotiation for power over another writer that is not
without a high degree of difficulty. But Writer A has the more secure
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authoritative position in this form of indirect citation, because the reader
217
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can only evaluate what Writer A has chosen to present; thus, there is less of
a threat the reader might disagree; Writer A is reporting his interpretation.
But note that, in addition to reporting, analysis is already a dominant
feature of this transaction, hence, some of Rose’s typology tends to break
down; neither skill is discrete from the other.
On the other hand, if Writer A were to include (within quotation
marks) an actual passage that Writer B has written, then Writer A ’s
authority is more at risk. Firstly, Writer A has an important degree of
control because he sets the context. If he is analyzing the passage, we can
assume that he has already laid out his argument and is using the passage to
support his claims. For example, he may be developing an argument that
the so-called metaphysical poems of John Donne (Writer B) are the works
of a frustrated cleric, deeply troubled about his own Christianity. Writer A
would lift passages of Donne’s poems that would illustrate this point. The
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writer is extracting them from one context-which may include the context of
the poem, of Donne’s body of work, or of Donne’s socio-historical or
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political setting-and putting them into his own. Writer A may point to
specific words or phrases in the passages that serve his ends. But he is also
running a greater risk than the writer who has paraphrased Writer B, for in !
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reading the original material (or even parts of it), the reader can potentially
come to other conclusions about the passages; the risk of disagreement is
greater. Hence the writer’s skill in negotiation for authority must show
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greater mastery. This negotiation goes awry quite frequently with novice
writers in cases where the evidence the novice presents leads a reader to a
quite different conclusion than the one the writer is trying to make. Hence
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the authority a writer is able to exert over another’s discourse within the
text (as in citing another writer) profoundly affects the degree of authority
exercised over the reader.
In my experience in the composition classroom, novice writers prefer
to include the discourses of other writers in the form of direct quotation for
several reasons: it is easier than paraphrasing, and it gives the students’ !
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texts, for at least a sentence or two, the skill and expertise that they aspire
to have, that of the expert, Other writer. Unfortunately, using direct
!
quotation as a rhetorical strategy frequently backfires in terms of
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presentation of authority, because the: authority is accorded the quoted
writer, and the student is plainly the weaker of the two.
^Skilled writers manage the discourses that they bring into their texts in
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ways that transform the discourse(s) of that Other writer, and exert
hegemony. vFirst, skilled writers rarely use the other writer to make their
points for them. Consider the following passage by Northrop Frye:
i
A hundred years ago the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold
pointed out that we live in two environments, an actual social one and ,
an ideal one, and that the ideal one can only come from something
suggested in our education. Arnold called this ideal environment
culture, and defined culture as the best that has been thought and
said. The word "culture” has different overtones to most of us, but
219
Arnold’s conception is a very important one, and I need it at this
point. (The Educated Imagination. Chapter 1) j
Frye then goes on to make the point that his interpretation of Arnold has j
suggested. H e transforms Arnold’s discourse in several ways. H e reviews
Arnold’s points in his own words; they become Frye’s interpretation. And
he uses and transforms this interpretation to elaborate on a point he; wants ■ ,
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to make. H e reports, analyzes, and manipulates, and he cues the reader
that this is precisely what he is doing. j
I
Second, skilled writers often approach the discourses of others with a
' /
critical attitude. In her book The Subject of Semiotics. Kaja Silverman is
not simply providing a history of semiotics but a history that is annotated |
and evaluated in her own discourse. For example, she cites a passage from j
Roland Barthes’s S /Z where he describes what he means by "the
connotative signifier," to which she responds:
Barthes’s use of the term "connotative signified" may be a bit
misleading since it indicates signifieds which themselves connote or
"point to" further meaning, and not necessarily signifieds which are the
result of connotation, although that is almost always the case as well.
i
Her own authority is amplified because she not only makes use of Barthes’s
discourse but presents it to the reader within a web of her own design,
resulting in an aggrandizement of her authority. She is using her power to
shape, alter and control not only Barthes but potentially the reader’s
understanding of Barthes.
220
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By "management of discourses" I do not simply mean a skill at
bringing the words and ideas of others under the control of a central ethos.
As I have argued earlier, the words and ideas of others are always a part of
the languages we speak; they are disparate, even cacophonous, colliding and
struggling against one another (to borrow again from Bakhtin). Management
includes, then, the way writers give shape to this cacophony— even if only
temporarily-via their lexical and syntactic choices, textual structure, :
approach, genre selections. In order to exert any influence at all, the novice ;
- • I
writer has to cultivate the competency to recognize discourses, including her
own, their impact on audiences, and how each discourse interacts with other
discourses. Students need to know techniques to manipulate the power they
already have in their own lives. They need to learn how to become agents,
with the understanding that agency is always socially constructed.
MANAGEMENT OF THE READER
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Writers who have skill at managing the discourses of Others in their
texts can also manage the discourse of the most pivotal other participant in
the transaction: that of the reader. Specifically, the writer with "author-ity,"
is the one who has shaped her authorship in conjunction with the reader.
i
The writer does not necessarily control the reader, for that power is always ;
I
out of the writer’s grasp. But the writer gains skills at creating "author-ity"
by cultivating an awareness of how the discourses she uses might be
221
revoiced, and by shaping, as much as possible, this revoicing. For example,
she needs to use a cuing system to guide the reader through her text; this
system may include transitional devices, a particular way of presenting and
developing a thesis, and paragraph structuration (a statement of a point and
cuing where and how that point is supported).1
Authority, in this context, is the power to influence or command
thought. To achieve this, as Bartholomae has argued, writers need to know
how to use the language appropriately for the discourse community that they
are addressing. They also need to understand that "correctness" or
I
appropriateness— at least as regards the accretion of power-is in the mind of
the reader. Appropriateness includes syntax and lexicon appropriate to the
task, as well as an understanding of what will work and what will not for a
particular occasion for a particular audience. This includes knowing that
audience’s state of mind, beliefs, personality, history (what has gone on
before and what will come after), culture, ideology, and politics. In one of
the well-known debates in Classical rhetoric, Thucydides’s "Revolt of
Mytilene," the Athenian audience has, just previous to the debate, changed
its mind about putting the entire population of Mytilene to death for the |
revolt by a few. Cleon, arguing that the entire city be put to death as
originally decided, anticipates that his opponent, Diodotus, will attempt to j
reason with the listeners, so Cleon tries to whip them into such an angry
frenzy that they won’t listen to reason. He also knows that the Athenians i
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are staunchly devoted to democratic ideals and thus prone to weighing
matters carefully, and, if they think about it long enough, they probably will
decide to spare the city. As it happens, Diodotus, in his response, is
successful at appealing not merely to the Athenians’ reason but to their
pragmatic sense of self-interest. One could argue, then, that Diodotus
successfully structured the argument in the minds of the listeners in two
ways: first, he brought under control the inflammatory rhetoric of Cleon by j
attacking Cleon’s authority (which was considerable, as he was highly
respected) and by questioning the wisdom of advocating precipitous action; j
j
and second, he attacked the Athenians’ ambivalence, reworking it into a
conviction that they apparently came to see as the only "reasonable" course
of action. It is a tenet of Aristotelian rhetoric that a speaker should seek to I
persuade an audience in such a way that the listeners believe they have
arrived at the same conclusion as the speaker through their own reasoning
abilities and intellectual competence. They are aware that they have been
i
guided, but that guidance has been deemed logical, reasonable, and
persuasive because it coincides with what they had in mind already. This is
how writing can "resonate."
It should be obvious by now that the creation of authoritative and ;
powerful ethos has very little to do with "speaking in one’s own voice."
Elbow’s phenomenology of voice is a risky oversimplification of a complex
I
J problem, ostensibly for the purpose of making learning to write easier and
223
more accessible. Neither writing nor effective rhetoric is easy, nor is it is
readily accessible, both because the rules of game are difficult to learn and
because precisely what those rules are is not often made clear or
understood. Writing requires expertise on multiple levels that all influence
one another. The key to coming to terms with this complexity may lie in
what James G ee calls "metaknowledge," that is, the cultivation of an
awareness about discourses and rhetoric, about the kinds of ways we
persuade people, and about the ways writers and speakers can and do
structure ethos and acquire authority. At the very least, metaknowledge
gives writers an understanding of the complexity involved and the realization
that the negotiation for power is actually a complex negotiation; power does
not evolve from a mysterious wellspring of personal (and private) passion as
the proponents of "voice" in composition might argue. Elbow is correct
when he suggests that when something we write resonates, it resonates with
the reader, but he fails to explain how this works, mostly because he
1
continues to focus attention on the writer rather than on the writer-reader
connection. The perspective I advocate here suggests a significantly
different attitude toward authority in writing; it does not reside solely with
the writer. In a sense, the writer tries to access what already exists in the
f
mind of the reader and reshape it in the hopes that the reader may come 'to
a new understanding that has some synchrony with the writer’s own.
Authority is something the reader grants, never completely and never for
224
long, and it is always dependent on the competence the writer has in
managing the reader’s discourse.
Endnotes
1. See Joe Williams & Gregory Colomb, Discourse Structures: Technological
(Report # 3 (Chicago: Little Red Schoolhouse Enterprises, 1987).
225
C O D A
In the course of this study, I have tried to accomplish several things.
First, I hope to have shown that any critique of voice as a metaphor
necessarily also includes examinations into the functions of language and
knowledge, and into ways of reading and writing and being in the world.
Voice is linked to ideology, culture, and politics, and as such, is perhaps best
examined in light of these interconnections.
Voice is the metaphor of the current historical moment. Its pervasive
use in composition pedagogy reflects the current American preoccupation
with self that has arisen-at least in part--out of Emersonian individualism.
Such a perspective encourages the perception that language is a private
affair, something individuals do by and for themselves. I hope to have
suggested at least a few of the viable alternatives to this viewpoint.
In my discussions beginning with Plato and ending with Peter Elbow,
we have come full circle. Although modern theorists of voice in
composition pedagogy might deny it (as teachers of writing). I would argue
that an important assumption underlying their arguments is that writing may
not necessarily a good thing, echoing in a distorted way, Plato’s mistrust of
texts. Nervous about the perceived separation of the author from her text,
writing theorists and teachers like Elbow want to make writing more like
Speech in order to give it presence, resonance, and "juice," arguing that this
226
is the only avenue to powerful writing. As with Plato and as I have argued
in Chapter 7, one needs to question whether empowerment is the real goal
and if so, power for whom and under what circumstances.
Where might we go from here? Certainly the influences of social
constructionism, reader-response theory, and sociolinguistics have helped to
change the ways readers and critics regard texts. As a consequence the
metaphors that are used to describe textual dynamics are also in flux. But,
as I have shown, the human voice is deeply embedded in the ways speakers
and listeners interact with the world and thus will inevitably continue to
play an important role in discussions of language. Voice, then, as it is
applied to texts will certainly persist, remaining both an important and
controversial metaphor.
! 227:
I |
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235
APPENDIX - Reading Response To The Grass Harp (Chapter 6)
This appendix includes the protocols referred to in Chapter 6, including a
description of the procedures and questions and transcriptions of the
responses. Note that all readers read from the same edition of The Grass
Harp (Capote, Truman. The Grass Harp. New York: Random House,
1951). The first passage they read, denoted as Passage # 1 , begins at the
opening of the book and runs through page 12. Novice readers did not
read the entire passage, reading usually to page 8. Passage # 2 was from
page 35-40, beginning at the opening of Chapter 2.
Expert and expert professional readers were given the list of instructions,
the book, and a tape recorder; they completed the protocols on their own,
without the presence of the researcher. One of the novice readers
participated in the study as part of a reading tutorial session; as such, her
regular tutor was present. The other novice reader read the passages alone
to herself and I was present to ask the questions following each passage.
Brackets ([]) indicate researcher notes, summaries, and clarifications.
The instructions below were given to the reader:
INSTRUCTIONS TO READERS
Try to treat the tape recorder as a reading diary. You are reporting on
your reading of this section of the novel. It is not a test; there are no right
or wrong responses. I am interested in your personal response to what you
read. Any and every response you have is appropriate.
1. Read pages 3-12 to yourself. Take as much time as you like. As you
go along, comment on what you read into the tape recorder, indicating
where in the text you are as you comment. Comment wherever and
however often you feel like commenting.
2. When you have finished the section, answer the following questions, one
question at a time. Record your answer into the tape recorder. You may
refer back to the text if you wish.
QUESTIONS
a. What does the passage mean to you?
b. What did you think of the passage as you were reading?
236
c. Did you encounter any problems in reading it? If so, what?
d. Did you enjoy any sections of the passage more than others?
Please comment.
3. Read pages 35-40 to yourself, again commenting on your reading into
the tape recorder as you go along.
4. Read the same passage aloud into the tape recorder. Read for your
own comprehension. Again comment on what you read AS YOU READ
into the tape recorder.
5. When you have finished reading the section aloud, answer the following
questions.
a. How did reading the passage aloud change your way of reading?
b. Did reading aloud change the meaning of the passage in any way?
c. What do you remember from the passage?
6. D o you know anything about the author? (both from reading the
passage and/or from your own knowledge about that author)
237
Reader Response to The Grass Harp
READER: Mary (NOVICE READER)
April 19, 1991
Stats: Age 41, female. High school education. Work: receptionist/clerical
worker in ophthalmologist’s office.
PASSAGE # 1 (silent reading)
Grass harp, I have a hard time comprehending that, (sighs) It’s the way
the wind blew through the grass?
It sounds like she’s visiting home for the first time in a long time. She
talks about . . . um, her folks and her kinfolk lying beneath the earth, and
the season’s changes.
And it’s kinda sad.
Well, I’m at the passage where Dolly says, "Do you hear?" It’s on the
fourth page, "That is the grass harp." (indistinct)
I still don’t know what the grass harp is. I can imagine what it is, but . . .
it’s just really not self-explanatory, (indistinct, mother?) My mother is dead,
my father . . .
Like their family, um, well, have been apart a while. "My father, a
travelling man." Hm. My father was always home. I really can’t
understand how they could keep the family together at home and be also on
the road. I guess she did what she had to do in those days.
Money troubles. [Made?] a loan and somebody never paid him back.
Something about a very rich person. I don’t know if the rich person, um,
acquired it on their own (indistinct) . . . or worked for it.
Arguments between relatives, one that has no name, one that doesn’t.
Might have (indistinct) unmarried woman, she must have been on her own,
because it says, um, "Anyway, Papa said he would never set foot in her
house." Hm.
Hm. Sounds like her father was a bit of a storyteller when it came to . . .
the one sister with money. They lived together. The two sisters.
238
There again. I think it’s the best time to get married, (indistinct, when you
don’t know each other?) and then you both grow up together hopefully.
She didn’t live (indistinct). "She did not live to be thirty." She died young.
H e took it hard. Tore off all his clothes and ran out [naked?] into the
yard.
I
Sounds like her father was very angry . . . about the passing of his wife.
Fortunate for him to get the emotions out.
Ooh. Emotion, throwing a vase against a wall or the china fixture, figure.
Hm.
[Attending to decoding predominates. Expert readers can attend to tape
recorder, their own thoughts about topic and can return to reading with
confidence. It’s like novice readers must cling to text.]
Hm. Seems like (indistinct), I’m must noticing her for the first time where !
she was getting back and listening to what people have to say, and, uh,
always being in a hurry.
Okay, I’m going to stop here. j
i
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 1 , administered by researcher)
1. It sounded like she was talking about something that took place a long
time ago, and that she was coming home, and that she was describing to an
outsider what, um . . . the description of the town, and, um, what had taken
place there many, many years ago.
2. It was sad. It was sad. You know, naturally when you refer back to,
nobody likes death and it seems like there was a lot of death involved there
and a lot of family, um, well, the two unmarried sisters that lived together
and the argument between the father. You know, it wasn’t really clear, I j
mean, you know, maybe I need to read it over several times but it wasn’t i
clear that it, it was his sister, I think it was. I think it was his sister. He
said he wouldn’t set foot in their house, or that one particular sister’s house,
so it, it sounded like they lived together but then he was still talking to one
(laughs) (indistinct) or something.
Q: The two sisters? i
239
A: Yes. Well, I mean, it said in the book they were living together, and
then he said that he wouldn’t set foot in that house again, so I don’t know.
I’m a little confused; I’d like to read it over and over again.
3. [Q: Any problems?] No. The tape recorder did bother me. And it
was kind of hard sitting here . . . and having that go on. I was very aware
of it. And trying to concentrate on what I was reading. And it seemed like
I had to go back a couple of times and make sense of the story.
[she admits to doing this often when she reads, going back]
4. [Q: Enjoyed any passages?] Well, the description of the town. I
appreciate people that can verbally tell you what they thought, what they
have experienced and to get you to like what they’re telling you by being
very explicit. Um. Catching a thought or catching ideas and enveloping
you into the story. I like that. [Q: So you felt enveloped?] Right.
PASSAGE # 2 (silent reading) i
i
(very low) (sounds out "Riley Henderson")
Hm. "If it hadn’t have been for Riley Henderson." Sounds like she’s
blaming ?him?.
i
I’m finding it harder to read. I’m more aware of that. It’s like it’s time ;
ticking away.
[Sounds something out] (indistinct)
[Mary bringing more native intelligence to project of decoding]
It’s harder to read; I don’t know how I’m doing, (sighs)
It’s very formal, when they speak to one another.
(indistinct) something about the (love?). Hm?
Sounds like the two ladies are having some kind of picnic and the young
man stumbled upon them as he was doing some hunting.
It’s almost like, um, the lady’s description of his clothing while he’s hunting, j
He really didn’t care whether his clothing was spotted by blood, (indistinct)
with anyone.
240
He also smelled of gunpowder, (indistinct)
Oh. H e found out their tree house. I guess he was walking by as he was
speaking to them. 'Til be damned, it’s a tree-house."
PASSAGE 2 (reading aloud)
[NOTES: puzzles over vocabulary "oilcloth" - apparently makes it hard to
understand sentence.]
[Skips "cantered" - too hard]
[Thinks about "garland" - sounds it out, considers what it is; can’t figure out
"squirrels.] M: "Must be their tails were tied together" [Passage becomes
confusing because she can’t figure out "squirrels", therefore revoices next j
part of sentence incorrectly; misreads the wording. Skips over most of the
next sentence - Note that the reading seems tired, as if she has given up.
Can’t figure out "veil" or "camouflage."]
i
[Tries out "paused"; can’t figure it out, moves on. Skips over several words.] |
j
MARY: This is very hard for me because I always avoided reading out i
loud and I think that when I read out loud, I try and rush and I don’t make
sense of anything. But when I read to myself it’s like, it makes sense. I
don’t understand why it’s so difficult . . . "as if waiting for a target to
appear." J
[skips "squirrels swinging". Substitutes "catch" for "chase."
Interesting, no problem with "cinnamon".]
[Substitutes "whispering" for "sighing".] i
[Some passages are remarkably smooth; in others, Mary seems to get very
frustrated and skips over a lot of words, misses easy words, changing word
order slightly. Overall, word order-because she is reading slowly--is adhered
to.]
QUESTIONS (to Passage # 2 , administered by Researcher)
Q: How’d it go?
A: Weird. Because I can read to myself and it’s fine. I’ve always
neglected to read out loud, because I feel like someone’s watching me and
I ll be criticized, uh, and I’m not going to be telling the story right. I read
more me into it or, instead of reading what is on the, written on paper.
1. I feel like I read a different story the second time around. I was trying
to stick more to it and understand it, but felt more put on the spot than
anything else.
[Q: more details or less details?] Just about the same. Maybe less, if I
hadn’t read it before, to myself. i
\
2. I read more of what the story was about than putting .... When I was
reading it to myself, it was more personal, and it wasn’ t that I was sharing
it with anybody but reading it by myself. Then when I was reading aloud, I
was sharing it with somebody and automatically it became important for me
to get the words across. I was sharing it with the tape recorder, a machine
that "wants the facts. Just the facts."
3. I remember about hunting and the girl having a breakfast in the trees
and then, all of a sudden, it was a tree house (indistinct to:) explained,
rolled on and the next thing you knew (indistinct) tree. Riley was a bit of
a (laughs)-. H e would tell everything.
[RE: The Narrator:] I thought it was one of the, I thought it was Dolly
herself. Because the first passage I read, I thought it was her describing the
town as she was going through it, and so I thought it was her talking.
4. [The Author. She has heard of Truman Capote, but she knows nothing
about him. She confuses the name with Don Quixote.
Sense of who speaker was (characteristics, values, etc.)? No.]
242
Reader Response to The Grass Harp
READER: Rita (with tutor, Ellen) (NOVICE READER)
March 1, 1991
f
Circumstances: As part of a reading lesson in a Literacy Program
Stats: White female, age 23, single parent, dropped out of 10th grade.
PASSAGE # 1 (silent reading) j
i
[E gives instructions about going through the reading. If R is struggling i
with a word, she’ll indicate the word to Ellen] :
R: What is this? E: Autumn, R: Autumn? That means like, different
seasons. E: The season after summer; sometimes we call it fall.
R: [sounds out "cemetery"] [middle of page three] [Asks Ellen about
"kinfolk."] I thought I’d do this better but I don’t think so. I don’t think I’d
be good for what she’s [the researcher] asking for. [Ellen gives some words
of encouragement, that it’s not a test; we’re interested in how the reading
strikes her.]
[After a long period of reading silently] ;
E: Are you understanding all those words? R: Yeah, so far. E: Because !
if you’re not that’s important to point them out so that we can discuss them.
[R’s acknowledgement]
R: [makes noise]. E: That word? Are you confused about that word? R:
Yeah. E: Yeah, so am I. [sounds out] Morphodyte. R: What is that? E:
I don’t know, Rita. "One of the stories that he spread was that Verena was
a morphodyte." R: H e’s calling her something. E: Yeah. I know what a
hermaphrodite is. So it has to do with something . . . I don’t know. I don’t
really know.
R: [sounds out "ridicule" p. 5] E: Ridicule. You ever heard that word?
R: No. E: Ridicule. It means to, to make fun of, to tease in a nasty
way. R: (overlapping) "Ridicule?" Oh, okay. E: H e ridiculed her for
turning her report in late. R: Oh, okay. E: But it’s worse than teasing; it’s
some kind of nasty kind of teasing. Making fun of someone in a nasty way.
R: Okay.
R: [points to the word "frigidaire"] E: Frigidaires. That’s a brand of
refrigerator. H e’s probably just talking, every time . . . "She used to cry
every time he went away to sell his frigidaires." R: Oh. E: Yeah, he
243
must be a the refrigerator salesman. R: Refrigerator. E: Frigidaire, have
you ever heard of refrigerator brand, Frigidaire? R: Yeah. E: Yeah,
that’s what that is. [There is a lot of soft overlapping repetition from Rita
of Ellen’s explanations]
E: You have a funny look on your face. Why? R: Because of this part.
E: What part? R: Um. 'Tore off all his clothes and went out, out naked
into the yard?" (laughs) E: What do you think of that? R: Well, it’s
something you don’t see that (laughs) many people doing. E: You don’t
see that too often.
R: [points to "debris" p.6] E: Debris. Debris. Have you ever heard of
that word? R: Um-um. E: It means, oh, God, junk, what’s left over, like
after the storm. Or, the storm washed all the debris out of the gutters. R:
(indistinct) E: Can mean any sort of trashy thing lying around. It usually
refers to something after . . . after something’s happened like after a storm '
or after the tide goes out, or . . . the debris is left. The debris after a fire.
R: [points to "Eugene" and makes a grunt] E: It’s a name. Eugene. R:
That’s how "Eugene" is spelled? E: You’ve heard of the name Eugene. R:
Yeah. E: That’s how it’s spelled. R: Really? E: Uh-huh. |
E: Tell me when you get down to here, okay [bottom of p. 6] R: (soft
grunt).
R: [tries to sound out "impressive" Ellen helps] Impress- E: Impress-, R:
Impress- . . . E: Impressive. R: Impresstive? E: Impressive. Look at
the ending. [They sound it out together] Impressive. R: Okay. [END OF j
READING]
Q U ESTIO N S (on Passage # 1 )
R: Okay. E: Okay? R: Hm-hm. E: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you
some questions. R: Okay. E: If you want to, uh, go back and look
through what you’ve read to answer ’em, that’s fine. What does the passage
mean to you? [long pause] E: You have any thoughts about that? What
does it mean to you? E: I mean, it doesn’t have to mean anything, but if ;
it did . . . R: No, not really. I mean, no. It was just a .... E: Just
what? R: (indistinct) It was a story, but, I mean, it didn’t really mean any-
- I mean . . . . E: So what do you mean by that it was a story. R: Mm.
E: You mean like just a, a ma-a make-up, a made-up . . . R: Yeah, to me.
Yeah. E: Okay. :
244
E: What did you think of the passage as you were reading it? R: My
opinion of the book (indistinct)? E: Yeah, what did you think of it? R:
(low grunt). E: Just your own opinion. R: (overlapping) (indistinct) I
know, bu- You know it’s hard for me to express my opinion. E: I know
it’s hard for you to express your opinion. It’s good practice, though. Just,
what did you think of it? Like it, didn’t like it, understand it, didn’t
understand it, thought it was a waste of time, was intrigued by it, you know.
R: I really didn’t understand it too much. E: Okay. Did you encounter
any problems in reading it specifically? R: Problems? E: You had some
word problems. R: Hm-mm. E: Okay, anything else? I mean, problems
jin not being able to, uh, figure out what a word was . . . R: (overlapping) J
Hm-mm. E: . . . in some cases, and then in other cases, not knowing what i
the word meant, right? R: (overlapping) Yeah. E: Any other problems? j
[long pause] R: Um. So-, uh, well, because of the words, some of the- I
didn’t understand exactly, you know, what they were talking about exactly.
E: You couldn’t follow the, the thought. R: Yeah. E: Okay. Did you
enjoy any sections of it? There was that one part that you kind of
snickered at, that image. R: It was just funny (laughs) during that. E:
| The funny, it was a funny image. R: Yeah. E: Which, and which one
was that? R: That was about the naked, uh . . . him taking off his clothes,
the father taking off his clothes and running out the door naked.
E: Okay. Were there any other sections that you enjoyed? [long pause]
That’s okay if there aren’t. R: No, not really. E: Okay, let’s turn to a i
different section . . . and I’m going to ask you to read, um, a couple of
pages to yourself, then we’ll go back and read them aloud. Um, page 35
and 36. Well, let’s see . . . Yeah, maybe just down to here on page 36. R:
| Okay. E: Okay?
i
PASSAGE # 2 (silent reading)
R: What does this mean? E: Haven’t we had that name? What do you
think it is? R: (sounds word out) Ri- Ril E: Ri- It’s " i" by itself, right?
Ri- . . . ley. R: Riley? E: Remember the "ey" is the long, like "he". R: i
(overlapping) (indistinct) E: The " i" by itself, Ri- . . . ley. R: Riley. j
R: (sounds out) squ- squ. E: Squirrels. R: Squirrels? E: (overlapping) j
Squirrels. Yeah. You know what a squirrel is. R: Yeah, (points to !
another word) E: Camouflage. Know what that means? R: (indistinct) j
E: Camouflage? R: Yeah, (indistinct) E: What do you think it means?
R: Um. I don’t know (indistinct) E: It means kind of to try and hide or
disguise something . . . like, in the desert, the troops wore those funny,
: spotted uniforms . . . R: (overlapping) Yeah. E: . . . to camouflage
themselves against the desert terrain. R: Oh, okay. E: Okay? R: Okay,
yeah.
R and E: (sound out "tightened") E: You know, to make something
tighter? R: (overlapping) Hm-mm.
I
R: (grunts) E: Detaching. De-ta-ch-ing.
R: Where did you say to read, up to there? E: Hmmm, yeah. R: Okay.
E: Are you there? R: Yeah. E: Okay, now, let’s read it aloud. And as
you read it aloud, if you have a ques- Again, anything that crosses your
mind, this is stupid, or that’s funny or I don’t, I don’t understand what’s
going on, anything that crosses your mind as you’re reading, say it out loud.
R: Okay. E: Okay?
PASSAGE # 2 (read aloud)
[Notes: Focuses on single word pronunciation, especially of words she is not
familiar with: garland, wary, proper nouns.
|
Problems with weird spellings: shouted, tightened, wavered, suspense,
propping (then fits it into the context "propping his gun"), folks, promptly.
Makes wrong predictions: "tiger" instead of "target"; "arm" instead of "aim."
"Perceive" instead of "present."
Sounds out: neck-lace (odd intonation).
Makes no distinction between one character’s dialogue and another’s. Very
i little pausing. Effort seems to be on plunging ahead and
deciphering/decoding words. Does do sentence final intonation.
"Wait a minute while bringing them up" instead of "wait a minute, I’ll bring
I them up to you." (false prediction)]
QUESTIONS ON PASSAGE # 2 j
E: Good. Okay, now as you were reading aloud did you have any J
j particular thoughts about that . . . R: No. E: . . . little scene? Okay. R: |
No. E: How did, how did reading that passage aloud change your way of j
reading, like, first you read it silently and then you read it aloud. What j
were the differences between the two in your way of reading? [long pause] !
246
R: Mmm. E: I can think of one right off the bat. (pause) You read it
faster aloud. Were you aware of that? R: Mm-mm. E: You definitely
read it faster when you read it aloud. That was one way. But, what, what
about any others? Can you think of anything? R: No. E: Not really?
R: Mm-mm.
iE: Okay. Um, did reading aloud change the meaning of the passage in
[any way? When you read it aloud did it mean something different from
what you got . . . . R: I understood it a little more. E: You did? R:
(overlapping) But . . . E: Why? Why do you think that is? R: . . . I still
don’t understand it (laughs) too well (continues low and indistinct under
following dialogue) E: Okay, you don’t understand exactly what’s going on
[but you understand it a little, well, you got to admit, I mean, you’re jumping
right in the middle so, you know, you haven’t really, it hasn’t been set up
for you. But you understand it a little better? R: Hm-mm. E: Okay,
um. D o you like it better, do you like it worse, do you think it’s dumb, do
you think it’s too difficult for you? Um. Any of those things cross your
mind? (long pause) E: Not really? R: Mm-mm.
E: Okay, what do you remember from the passage without going back and
looking at it now. R: You mean, the passage . . . ? E: Yeah, from what
you just read. When you take a excerpt of something and read it, that’s a
(passage. R: Mm. E: So from this passage, what do you remember?
Don’t look at it, tell me. I guess she [the researcher] doesn’t want you to
look at, I don’t know. R: Well, tell you what that meant? E: Yeah, what I
happened? R: Well, there were in a . . . well . . . they were in a tree, i
Catherine and I guess, Mrs . . . Talbo? E: Dolly. R: Oh, yeah, Dolly,
! also, Catherine, and Mrs. Talbo? E: No, Dolly is Miss . . . it’s Miss Talbo.
R: Oh, Talbo? E: That’s the same person. R: Oh. E: Catherine and
Dolly. It’s Dolly Talbo, I guess. Catherine and Dolly were in the tree, who
else was in the tree? (long pause) R: That’s all, no? E: No. Wasn’t the
narrator in the tree? (long pause) D o you remember when we talked
about first person. That’s the I. R: Uh-huh. E: I. Well, this is written . ;
. . R: (overlapping) Oh, yeah, that’s - E: . . . in first person. H e’s, it’s I, !
right? R: Or I (indistinct). E: So I, whoever I is, he had to be in the
[ tree, too, didn’t he? R: Oh, okay, yeah. E: So it looks like there are
! three people in the tree, right? R: Yeah. E: Okay, what else do you
remember? R: He had some squirrels hanging around his neck (indistinct)
E: Who did? R: Um, Riley? E: Yeah. R: Riley did. E: Riley j
Henderson came by. H e’s not one of the guys in the tree. R: Mm-mm.
' E: H e had a bunch of squirrels hanging around his neck. R: And a gun.
j E: And a gun. Leaving us to believe that he had shot the squirrels, right?
I R: I suppose so. E: Okay, what else do you remember? R: Um. And.
I 247
I
E: It’s okay if you don’t remember anything else. Is that all you
remember? R: Yeah . . . ?
;E: Um, this book was written by an author called Truman Capote. Have
you ever heard of him, do you know anything about this author? R: No.
E: Never heard of him? R: No.
AFTERTHOUGHT: E: You think you didn’t understand it, why? R: I
didn’t understand too well because of some of the words they use. E:
Some of the words the writer used? R: Yeah. E: Because you didn’t
understand the meaning of the words or because you thought they were
unusual words. R: Yeah, they were unusual and I didn’t understand some
of the meanings of the words.
248
R eader R esponse to The Grass Harp
R EA D ER : H elen (EX PER T R E A D E R )
March 3, 1991
Data: 35 years old, white female, college graduate, freelance journalist,
literacy tutor
PASSAG E # 1 (silent reading)
What strikes me from the first, uh, very first paragraph is that it’s a very
conversational style of writing, I mean, these are not sentences, formal
expository sentences. They’re very conversational. I don’t know what the
hell he’s talking about so far but he does sound like he’s just being j
1 conversational. j
I don’t know what a morphodyte is. Doesn’t sound nice. !
(
j
jl find it strange that this kid who’s just lost both parents in the space of a
few days, um, doesn’t, doesn’t express anything about his loss. H e talks
about getting good grades in school and stuff which is anathema to what we
read nowadays about how kids respond to grief. This kid doesn’t, seems to ;
be inured to all that, which is, I think, peculiar.
On page 9, the author talks about Verena’s attachment to Maudie Laurie
Murphy, which if I didn’t already know something about the author, I might J
just read, you know, in the normal way, but since I know that the author
was gay, I immediately suspect that Verena’s attachment to Maudie was gay
and certainly her behavior seems to indicate that. That may or may not be
important, I know nothing about this book, but just because I know what I
know about the author, it occurs to me. Not that it has any relevance or, (
uh, casts this book for me in any particular light.
He has wonderful metaphors. Uh, "shown on her cheeks like a voted |
tailight," "tantalizing tremor of their voices flowing like sap syrup through I
the old wood." Um, really nice. i
Q UESTIO NS (on Passage # 1 )
i
j 1. What does the passage mean to me? I don’t really, I don’t really 1
j understand this question. What does it mean to me? I’m not sure what j
| you mean by this question. I’ll tell you whether I liked it or not. I thought
I it was a nice descriptive passage. I thought it established um, the, at least
249
three of the, well, two characters, Dolly and Verena, very clearly and
established Collin as kind of the catalyst for what I assume is to come to
Jpass in the rest of the novel. Is that what you mean? I don’t know.
2. "What did you think of the passage you were reading?" Uh, I thought it
was a nice passage. I don’t know what more I can say other than what I’ve
'already commented on, that I thought it was weird that the kid didn’t seem
•to suffer any grief from the loss of his parents which I think is most
peculiar.
3. No problems in reading.
! j
U. Did you enjoy any sections of the passage more than others? Well, as I
said, I liked most of the metaphors and allusions very much. Um, I thought
they were creative and not overdone.
PASSAGE # 2 (silent reading) ;
I think it’s pretty weird that people are eating breakfast of chicken and
cake. Um, I mean I would eat something like that but the fact that
somebody else would is strange. Um, this, I’m in the second passage, p. 35.
I It’s pretty gross, the image of the dead squirrels. But I guess that’s the way i
it is in rural parts. !
i
t
It seems to me that Riley Henderson’s mother is flipped out. (pause) Well,
she got sent to an institution, apparently she was flipped out. (pause)
Apparently we’ve jumped in time over these few pages. He says that Riley
Henderson’s only a couple of years older than him and Riley’ s already j
fifteen, sixteen, so this kid, who I think was eleven if I recall correctly in J
the beginning of the book, by page 40, seems to be about fourteen.
Okay, now I’m reading into the tape recorder. I’ve read the 35-40 silently,
now I’ll read it into the tape recorder.
PASSAGE # 2 (read aloud) !
I
NOTES: (at about 250’) [Alters voice to represent different characters.] !
I
[Comments on "for Catherine or I to answer"] H: That’s bad grammar, !
"Catherine or I" . . . "Catherine or me" Uh . . . [continues reading.]
[Interesting-semi-modification of indirect discourse.]
250
H: "Oldsmobile . . . Riley who was not more than fifteen at the time."
What strikes me here is that it seems like such an old-fashioned kind of, uh,
you know, the people seem old-fashioned, the time seems old-fashioned, the
things that are bad. It’s either a contemporary novel written about a time
40-50 years ago or that’s when it was written. But that’s what it seems to
me.
"Shadows." I assume they’re condoms. The author doesn’t say.
That’s the end of the passage. What strikes me there is that it seems the
author is pretty forgetful, because in the beginning of this passage he says,
uh, he didn’t think Riley even knew that he existed or knew his name or j
whatever, and yet at the end of this passage they had a memorable, um, i
meeting one time, so obviously Riley did know who he was, so I don’t know
if that’s intentional or if it’s not intentional.
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 2 )
I
a. "How did reading the passage aloud change your way of reading?" Uh,
well, I read the passage faster because I wanted to make sure I got it onto
the tape, (laughs) I’m sure that’s not what you wanted to hear. Um, I’m
not sure it did change my way of reading. Uh. Hard to say. I don’t think
it did. I’m sorry, it didn’t.
; b. "Did reading aloud change the meaning of the passage in any way?" I
don’t think so. It, it sounds maybe a little bit more southern, um, reading it
aloud, because things like "dance and dine" and, and, uh, some of the quaint
language he uses, but it’s subtle. I don’t really think so.
c. "What do you remember from the passage?" I remember everything.
| The three of them were sitting in the tree having leftovers of cake and
, chicken. Uh, Riley Henderson’s poking around squirrel hunting, he’s kind of *
aiming his rifle around. One of them says, "Don’t shoot us, Riley." H e
says, "Oh, you’re up in a tree." Discovers there’s a tree house. Uh, it
forces Collin to think about Riley and his past and, um, his birth in China
and that of his sisters and the loss of his father and coming to America, his
mother flipping out after abusing, well, and then abusing her children,
getting sent off to an institution, uh, kids in custody of the uncle who’s j
, draining their inheritance. H e finally splits for, to be a riverboat pastor. |
: Uh, Riley drops out of school. The sisters stay in the school and do very j
well, and Riley takes care of everything and assumes the parental role. I
Um, and Collin’s admiration and jealousy of Riley and his position are
transparent throughout. So I guess I remembered everything, huh!?
6. "What do you know about the author both from reading, the passage
and/or from your know knowledge about that author?" Actually, I’ve never
really read anything by Truman Capote, but I do know that, that, uh, he
was a southerner, uh, that his books are heavily southern influenced, that he
was gay, um, so, you know, and that, all of those, well, some, a lot of those
were apparent in these passages just because, you know, an author’s
sensibility usually tends to seep through the pages of a novel and certainly
they seem to do that here. That’s about it.
r
252
.'Reader Response to The Grass Harp
[READER: Bob (EXPERT READER)
April 17, 1991
STATS: White male, 31 years old; lawyer (highest level of education: law
'school)
PASSAGE # 1 (silent reading)
It starts with a question which indicates to me that it’s almost an interview.
'The setting appears to me to be in the South, uh, just by virtue of some of
the language, the names, the Talbos, the Fenwicks, the word "kinfolk." The
setting is also real warm-feeling to me, at least with the description of the
autumn in this region. The first paragraph on page 4 indicates that this
grass harp has almost a spiritual and mystical quality to it because it can tell
stories and see things.
Again the language up on page 5 also indicates to me that this is a setting
in the southern United States. The name of Miss Dolly Talbo has a real
southern sound to it.
Pages 6 and 7, uh, the narrator cruises into a little more about his life, that
he never knew his father very well and it was unfortunate because his
father died while he was a kid, and he seemed to relish in his pitifulness
since he was left without parents. On page 7, the description of his dad’s
cousin, Dolly Talbo, is vivid. Uh, it sounds like she was a, an old maid
with not a whole lot to do. Then the description of the house is interesting.
Museum-like, uh, actually that word’s even used in the last paragraph on
page 7. Now on to page 8. By the further description of Dolly, it sounds
like she was pretty lonely, since her only friend was Catherine Creek and
her only contact to the outside was these letters she sent regarding the
medicines that they were selling. Verena, on the other hand, her description
starting on the bottom of page 8 through page 9, sounds like a hard and
cold woman, um, concerned mainly with her business, although like her
| sister, Verena was a recluse . . . and sounds like she led a pretty lonely life
as well, with her only pleasure being Kodak snapshots from her friend in
Arizona.
On to page 10, the description of Catherine Creek brought a smile to my
face, uh, the fact that she claimed to be an Indian and that she had no
teeth, but still tried to talk as if she had teeth. And the fact that she called
j Dolly, "Dollyheart," and called Verena "That One." You could tell there
| was some hostility between those two ladies.
253
Up until the first paragraph of page 11, it just occurred to me that we have
sort of a bird’seye view of this household, of the Talbo sisters and finally
we find out how Collin gets up into the attic. It almost sounds like his
cover is blown once Dolly discovers that he had been going up there to
spend time.
Um, by the end of the passage on page 12, you could tell that Collin hadn’t
much experience outside the house. His highlight was a trip to Brewton,
some sixty miles away, and, um, it’s curious that he said, uh, he doesn’t
know if he’ll ever go sixty miles again, and that could mean either, one, he’s
stuck in a small town or, two, he’s narrating this still as a kid or adolescent. !
Okay, that’s the end of my stream-of-consciousness on this first passage.
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 1 )
1. This passage seems to set the tone of what this book is about. Um. j
This kid’s experiences growing up in this small town, and, um, it provides
the setting for the experiences he presumably will have in the remainder of
the book. It also means to me that he was pretty observant to catch all the
subtleties that he describes in the Talbo household as well as the description i
of Catherine.
i
i
2. What did I think? I thought that this was an entertaining way to open
the book. Like I say, it sounded like an interview and gave a good
description of where we were at as readers and, um, who some of the main
characters are.
3. Any problems. I guess I had to get used to some of the wording and
even the names, Dolly, Verena, Collin. These are not common names to
me. What else? I guess the description of the attic and of the house in
general made me read a little slower so I could imagine what this house
looked like and also what these ladies look like.
4. Yeah, I enjoyed, uh, the little section on pages 9 and 10 and 11 about |
Catherine Creek and Dolly’s and Verena’s interaction with Catherine. I
thought that was pretty humorous.
PASSAGE # 2 (silent reading)
Okay, onto page 35, we encounter a new character, Riley Henderson. i
Looks like he’s discovered Collin, Catherine, and Dolly in a tree. Maybe j
254
they’re in a tree house. I don’t know. I know for sure though that we’re in
the South. Uh, the, uh, bird dog, um, the name Riley sounds real Southern
to me, and then this garland of bleeding squirrels. I don’t know where else
they have squirrels but the south.
Well, on the page 36, obviously, all these people know each other, and, um, !
sounds like they’re friends, um. i
The fact that, uh, Dolly says, "That’s a fine mess of squirrels," and uh, Riley
offers them a couple. And, uh, then the description of him, he sounds like
a real outdoorsman.
I
Then on to page 37, Collin is surprised that Riley even knows who he is.
This seems to agree with the first part of the book where Collin indicates
that he’s somewhat of a recluse. Then we also learn the Collin and Riley
are about the same age, but that Riley has somewhat of a bad reputation in
town. I
t
i
And then finally from the middle of page 37 through pages 38 and 39, we j
learn the real story about Riley Henderson, about his bizarre mother and his j
rebellion in living with his uncle Horace. |
I
In the middle of page 39, I got a kick out of his uncle’s new application as
the Minister of Romance down in New Orleans and I also got an image of
Riley as a real town playboy with the only nice girls in his car being his
sisters. And the fact that he drove them on Sunday afternoons almost
seems to indicate that he was a good guy on Sundays and a hellion on all
other days.
It also sounds like Riley was pretty protective of his sisters, seeing that
everybody was, or all the young men around, were afraid to come near him. ;
On to page 40. Collin seems to idolize this guy Riley. Knows all about his
car and what he did with his life, fishing and hunting. And then at the end
of the passage, describing one of the only times that they spoke was at his
Aunt Verena’s drugstore and it looks like Riley came in to buy some
prophylactics and little innocent Collin had no idea what they were.
PASSAGE # 2 (read aloud)
NOTES: [Reads dialogue with special intonation.]
255
[Reads slowly, casually, seems to read for understanding.]
[Gives rising intonation to questions in dialogue. Special intonation for I
Collin’s thoughts, especially when they seem more subjective. For example,
"objective" reading includes description of Riley’s family and past.
"Subjective" - present thoughts on Riley’s interaction with him.]
[In passages where direct discourse is without quotes (top 39), he makes
quick intonational transitions - kind of like riding the fence, easily able to
make the shifts.] i
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 2 )
[Notes from conversation two days later]
I
[Reading aloud forced him to go slower, concentrate on the words. It was
more enjoyable, because he could add more intonation. He found himself
listening to himself.]
i
[What did he remember? That Collin was very taken by Riley. Wanted to '
be like him but never could. Recalls vivid description of Riley.]
AUTHOR?: [Has very little knowledge of Truman Capote. Figures that i
Truman Capote is the Collin figure, a person dominated by women, a wimp.
Feels that this is autobiographical and likes this aspect because it helps to
teach.]
R eader R esponse to The Grass Harp
R EA D ER : Martha (EX PER T PRO FESSIO NAL R E A D E R )
March 7, 1991
Stats: White female, age 44. PhD Literature and Critical Theory,
j PASSAG E # 1 (silent reading)
jThe first sentence seems pretty awkward and it made me pause but after
that I kind of get a feel for the Southern here.
And small town . . . enclosed in narrow . . . are people? And ancestors, my
mother lies next to my father. ;
And the real colorful depiction of autumn. Nostalgic. j
The introduction of Dolly makes me wonder. Sister? And then later when i
| it says they were gathering roots with Dolly, I wonder, what is the
relationship?
And I see that the grass harp is a storyteller, just as the author is a 1
storyteller in this part. And it tells the stories of real people, uh, not just
myth.
Ah, Dolly is his cousin. And as typical in families, there’s rifts with Verena
and "my father did not speak.” I
And all of sudden we get the small town value of money being the only
i thing of worth.
And all of a sudden there is an irony here. And the earning of it had not
made her an easy woman.
I see too that Papa is a storyteller. H e spreads them around, [interruption]
We see Dolly is a character that the protagonist really enjoys, or the
narrator at least. And here, I think they were very much in love, "my
father" and of course this a typical young man’s perception-I assume it’s a
man but it need not be— of their parents. Idealistic. Selling his frigidaires
gives me pause.
i
I
But Papa’s nakedness . . . certainly is interesting in that regard. A primitive
grief perhaps?
257
Uh, the collapsing of gender is certainly in Verena with the peppersalt hair,
the whip-thin, handsome woman, the virile eyebrows, the dainty cheek mole
. . . sort of an awesome person.
Papa’s breaking things again gives sort of a grotesque to the whole scene
and a despair to his grief. Verena’s strictness shows that there’s going to be
order that comes into this household.
I see clearly that this is a retrospective story when he says, "I’m sorry now
that we did not hug each other, because a few days later on his way up to ;
Mobile, his car skidded and fell fifty feet into the Gulf." So already we
have lots of death, suicide, despair against a very small town, kind of
normal backdrop. And the silver dollars, we’ve got money here again, too.
Ah, it is a man. Collin Fenwick. It seems to me to be pretty
autobiographical, too, if we’re talking about Truman Capote and his age, a
runt. I
Ah, Dolly is more than a cousin. "And when I did I fall in love?" And an
interesting rather unmasculine ability of the narrator to, uh, perceive what it
would be like for a young girl when he, a boy, came into the house.
Definitely shows it’s a retrospective story.
i
Also as a feminist, it appeals to me that he describes her as a woman that
can disguise herself as an object in room, "a shadow in the room whose
presence is a delicate happening." What a masculine way of perceiving
womanhood. j
i
Oh, and she’s virginal, of course.
The attic brings the nostalgia of me, the reader, back when you know that
he’s going to tell you about all sorts of wonderful things that are there. I’ve
always liked categories of things, so I like the categories of this attic a lot.
I also like the idea-, the talk of virginal and nuns, um, but juxtaposed on
the idea that there’s lushness there as well.
When Dolly has seemed to be snipping with her garden shears on her hair, i
we see something that isn’t as feminine as he originally depicted. Maybe a i
writer in the making?
i
She was writing letters.
258
Ah, she’s sort of a witch. Gathering ingredients. Certainly he’s building
Dolly with lots of feminine kinds of graces.
And yet even then he undercuts a traditional gender rendering by talking ;
about her totaling figures, turning pages of letters. Ah, we’re talking about
Verena . . . who is completely, with the virile eyebrows, very masculine
indeed. The opposite perhaps of Dolly. Sorry, I got that screwed up.
She’s sort of genderless; she doesn’t fit anywhere. Verena, that is. Ah,
probably a lesbian. Maudie Laurie Murphy, blond, jolly girl.
j
I like the line, "these pleasures-or these pictures were a pleasure and a |
grief." I see the old ex-lover being pleased that her friendship continues but i
the grief that.her friend or companion married traditionally and then went
out of her orbit.
Oh, and we see the loneliness of the lost love . . . which makes Verena a i
far more interesting character than when she’s just so dogmatic. |
i
I’m reading about Dolly’s friend, Catherine Creek, and I find that I want to j
skim that because it doesn’t interest me as much, this idea of where she is j
and who she is as some of the other stuff. But I do like that Dolly she
called, "Dollyheart," and Verena she called, "that one."
Ah, it gets better. She claimed to be an Indian.
The make-up is interesting, the votive tail lights. Ah, but no teeth, just J
when I think she’s beautiful. Oh, and talk about Southern grotesque. She i
kept her jaws jacked up with cotton wadding. And interesting, Dolly is a j
translator of her friend’s inarticulate noises. They too have a relationship
that seems . . . tied by something unusual, although it doesn’t seem like it’s
eroticism as this point.
I see also that when we’re talking about to reach that attic, that the narrator j
is winding his way through the house as he tells me about these characters,
placing me not only within the characters’ minds and his attitude but in the
house itself. For what reason I don’t know. 1
<
And we see now that Collin has been out of it, too. Uh, when Dolly says,
"This is where you come, we wondered"--we see that Collin has been the
observer to other peoples’ relationships rather than being part of them.
And we see Dolly is gifted, at least through Dolly’s eyes. And we see Dolly
as also intuitive. " I told Verena that you would be lonesome." And
259
immediately involves--she, Dolly-involves Collin in what she’s looking for,
bringing him into the center of her circle.
And then, right in the middle of this kind of wonderful scene, we have, "we
used to have a bowl of tropical fish. Devils, they were, ate each other up"-
-this kind of grotesque cannibalism that it’s at the heart, that seems to be at
the heart of the story.
And then humor. "Oh, thank you. I love a piece of candle-candy, even
when it tastes like a pebble." So we obviously have two imaginative
characters at the center here. And then of course the next paragraph. "We
were friends, Dolly, Catherine, and me." Uh, Dolly brought him into the
center and now they become three instead of two with one excluded. And
then the passage of years, " I was eleven, then I was sixteen." The loveliness
of those years, obviously because of Dolly and Catherine.
And then he excludes others, the girl at the picture show, in order to stay
part of that three instead of being, maybe, a foursome.
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 1 )
The passage to me, uh, seems to be the introduction of a story involving the
closeness that children and young adolescents have, um, when for some
reason they’re outside and this s-strong, not too sympathetic, woman,
Verena, brings them in to let them be who they are rather than the kind of
things that families impose on children. And I expect that the story
introduces me to the characters and lets me want to know what their
adventures are going to be. Um. I see loneliness, I see gender upheaval,
um, I see tenderness, I see some Southern Gothic. As I was reading, I kept
taking it in parts which I’m not sure I do as a normal reader. Um, when I
read silently normally, I have this huge picture that kind of flows through
my mind [interruption] that becomes sort of like a movie screen. As I read
it this time, however, I was conscious of the parts of each of it, um. I was
interested in the unfolding of the characters. Also since I studied To Kill A
Mockingbird so many times I was very much interested in Capote’s style as
compared to Harper Lee’s.
The problems I had in reading it was the consciousness of the tape recorder,
breaking it into bits. The first line kind of held me. Um, but otherwise,
no, I didn’t have problems.
I loved the passage where, uh, he talks about the attic, when he, and I was,
when he finally gets to the Catherine section, um, and he talks about her
260
exoticism, I like that. I liked the description very much of Verena. I found
it compelling and interesting. Um, I told you I liked catalogues. I liked
putting this place in a town that maybe I know.
PASSAGE # 2 (silent reading)
We see that there’s still-som e, somehow these people are still together but
there’s an interloper, Riley Henderson, but as a child there’ s always an
interloper who catches you doing things.
It reminds me so much of when I was playing with my friend Susan at Mrs.
MacPherson’s house, this idea of the tree house and the breakfast, that I’m
almost having trouble not picturing that scene other than this Capote scene.
And we see Riley Henderson, again, a very strong masculine figure
compared to Collin’s almost feminized version of himself.
And we have Dolly becoming part of nature, her veil that she lowers to
camouflage herself. Um.
Riley obviously is the idealized version of what strong adolescence should
be. Uh, but, and we see Catherine yelling, um, but it’s humorous, "Don’t i
you dare shoot us." He mocks them for sitting in the tree, for just sitting, I
not having a task to do. But we see that Riley isn’t really a bad guy after j
all. But we see that, that Riley’s generous, he’ll give them a couple of |
squirrels. H e’s a nice guy even though he’s out of their circle. H e’ s j
practical, he knows about ants getting squirrels. But he’s also far more, um, }
into the violence of hunting and nature, the squirrel blood, the gun powder.
And then he discovers their tree house but he’s too strong for it, he stamps.
We see Collin is attracted to him because he realized with a happy shock j
that "he called my name. I hadn’t thought Riley Henderson knew me from i
dust." H e gives himself identity. "But I knew him all right." Riley
Henderson was talked about so we know he’s the subject of some of these ;
stories, perhaps the Grass Harp stories. !
"Mean and hard. That was because he would only let us envy him, let us |
love him, be his friend." And yet that may be the perc-, the narrator’s j
perception since Riley seems to me to be fairly friendly, um, he may be as I
outside as others. I
I
i
We see him as an exotic, born in China. A missionary . . . father. Rose,
the beautiful woman . . . until she started wearing glasses. Then we see
261
Rose Henderson becoming eccentric as they do so often in the South, and I
do very much picture this as a Southern story though I don’t know why.
And we see that Riley too has had an upbringing that is very harsh, um, an
eccentric mother, a dead father. Though she let him run wild, though, her
punishments are bizarre.
But she hates children, and wishes they were dead. I begin to feel a lot of
sympathy for Riley. Not only is her, his mother eccentric but she’s a
potential murderer, and Riley is having obviously to . . . be the purveyor of
order in that house, maybe just as Verena is in her, um, though monstrous a
household it seems.
Ah, Rose has become the madwoman, institutionalized, though she seems
truly mad, not just mad from a masculine conception. And then we have
another woman, Mamie Curtis, as fast as lightning. Ah, the older woman j
syndrome. |
[interruption]
The story gets real plot-centered here and it loses me as I’m much more
interested in the description which I find compelling and interesting.
Again we have escapes to other places, Horace going to New Orleans,
everybody seems to be coming from somewhere or going somewhere. It j
doesn’ t seem the stable town that I once thought. I like the minister of j
romance though. It sort of mocks that love thing but still makes it j
interesting.
And then we have Riley typically having a red, racy car, going around with
floozies, a word Collin would use.
[had pause button down, so upon reflection:]
Elizabeth, uh, Collin feels far more comfortable with Elizabeth. Riley, J
again, seems, his apartness is everywhere, he doesn’t fit in anywhere though ;
he’s got some wonderful qualities. Um, I love the part where he i
remembers the only time he ever talked to him was when he was in the 1
drug store, reminding me of times when I was a child that I had an idol j
and remember the only time that I ever seemed to get recognition from ;
them. And then, the package of Shadows thing-very humorous though I J
have to infer, of course, that Shadows are condoms, and we see him
laughing not unkindly but Collie feels that he was a fool and therefore they j
262
could never be friends though it’s his imposition not Riley’s, who it seems to
me, is as lonely as any of the figures, um, that have been here.
Um. Dolly, um, offers Riley a piece of cake at the end reminding me we
are back at the tree house. We have shifted from straight memory. That’s
it.
READER NOTE: One of the things I’ve noticed is when I read to respond j
immediately, I read critically rather than for pleasure. When I, if I was i
reading this for pleasure I would be much more caught up in plot, I think. !
I think I would just enjoy the scenes as they unfold rather than making j
some of the kinds of responses I’ve made about feminism, about gender,
um, collapsings, about the scenery and how that kind of effects my feelings
about the character. It really is really a different kind of reading when you
read to respond rather than when you just read to read. Or, um, if you
read to respond at the end of the passage, it’s different than when you read
every sentence or so.
PASSAGE # 2 (read aloud)
i
NOTES: [I get the impression that this skilled reader can misread a j
passage orally and yet completely get the gist of the passage. In other ;
word, have the wrong intonation so that a sentence doesn’t make sense, and i
yet she makes sense of the passage a beat later. Storing in iconic or echoic 1
memory?]
[Errors in articles, connectors, singulars instead of plurals.]
[Occasions where there’s no pauses for periods; she’ll reread sentences to
make sense.]
READER COMMENT: Collin’s whole perception of himself colors what he
thinks about others. And, um, we also, there’s such a pathos here, I don’t
know how to describe it. Um, Dolly said, ’’ Have a piece of cake, Riley."
And he asked, "Did we always have picnics this early in the day." Again
that somehow underlines the pathos to me.
QUESTIONS (on Passage # 2 )
a. Reading aloud change: It made it more organized for me. I was much )
more focused on the reading. When I was doing it before, I was, the tape I
recorder was just there and kind of winding, and I was wondering how fast
to read, um, how to identify the place in the text, uh, this time I felt very,
263
very focused, maybe because this is something I would do in a classroom,
this reading and explaining, and I felt much more comfortable with it and
much more engaged in it somehow; I was there.
b. My own engagement became much more clear here. I knew that not
only did I like Riley or he remind me of things from my childhood, but I
liked him the character and was engaged with him the character and felt a
little bit like Collin, too, as if, as if his, my voice was his or his voice was
mine.
c. I remember the red car, I remember the, Rose and her terrible tragedy
and madness. I remember, um, Dolly’s offering the cake, the squirrel blood
on the shirt, the tree house, and their childhood against the floozies and the
confidence of Riley.
6. AUTHOR - I’ve read some Capote though I’ve never read the Grass
Harp. I know he was little and effeminate and gay, though I think he
writes with astonishingly masculine power, whatever that means. Um,
maybe he writes with astonishingly feminine power which is why I so often
loved it. Um, he writes of the South, and I only know this and that a
student one time did a report on how Truman Capote influenced Harper
Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird so much and, yes, I can see so much sameness,
the narrator from age coming back and remembering a childhood, the South,
that sort of sensuous ability to tack on to the sensual, um, the gap between
what it is to be little and puny and a young boy who may not be sure of
your own masculinity and, and this Riley, who, who seemed to me to be the
epitome of social power and also aloneness, though, and, um. The book
intrigues me, I’d love to read it, I will.
Um, I love the sensuality, and I don’t know whether to call it masculine or
feminine but certainly that engagement with the surroundings and with the
moment.
I just want to add that this is sort of fun for me to do but very nerve-
racking wondering what you’re sounding like on tape at first and if you’re
sounding intelligent as a PhD student.
264
Reader Response to The Grass Harp
READER: Self-study (EXPERT PROFESSIONAL READER)
April 10, 1991
Stats: female; PhD Candidate in English, Freshman Composition teacher.
PASSAGE # 1 (silent reading)
What is a grass harp? What is a China tree? The Church Road reminds
me of a road in the English countryside. But it’s not England. "Our
people” . . . must be in the East coast. No, Baptist, south. It’s the high
field of Indian grass. Reminds me of a field near where I grew up. I
remember lying in the grass and it made a lot of hissing noises and made
my back itch.
This is very dramatic, "red as sunset," "winds strumming on its dry leaves,"
"sighing human music." This must be what the book is about.
Bottom of page 4; they lock the conflict, nobody likes anybody else much.
Papa sounds like a miserable bastard, a wretch. Mother and father loved
each other a lot. This is very romanticized stuff, but kind of nice. Verena
reminds me of someone I know but cannot place. "Peppersalt hair, virile
eyebrows, dainty cheekmole." Someone I’ve met, or a conglomeration of ,
people I’ve met.
I cannot recall who the mother is related to, I checked back, she’s Verena’s
cousin.
Tragedy mixed with the macabre. Father dies without love of narrator; the j
next time the narrator sees him, he has silver dollars over his eyes. Is the
narrator male or female? A "runt," probably male.
"Collin," definitely male. H e’s in love with Dolly Talbo. Author tells tale
with delicate style. Dolly’s presence was "a delicate happening" in a room.
Kress paper. Like the drugstore I used to go to back home?
i
i
Verena rather a sad woman. No friends. Collin knows a lot from his perch
in the attic.
Catherine Creek reminds me of a homeless person who used to harass me
in the park. With her overly rouged face and she had no teeth. She’s
265
I
Indian, no, Black. She’s hard to picture . . . who to trust, her own
description of herself or Collin’s?
Fish they used to have ate each other up. Innocence and violence.
Q UESTIO NS (on Passage # 1 )
i
1. The passage set the scene. This is a very tangled yarn about people
who are in trouble. The relationships are complex. Collin is the focus but
his focus is on Dolly. They are all foils for each other. The mood of the
passage is extraordinarily rich. Imagery is colorful, sensual. I get a strong
sense of place, of trees, of the old house, of the rooms flavored by the
personalities of the inhabitants, of characters, especially Dolly’s with her
green eyes that are timid and watery. j
I
2. I thought how I might like this book because the author has such a soft i
way of describing things. It’s very full and very evocative. It kept
reminding me of things, yet creating things on its own.
3. No, except by having to comment on it, I had to slow my reading
process and disrupt it.
i
4. I enjoyed the descriptions of the grass harp, loved the notion of people’s
stories being mixed up with the sound of the grass. It’s like music, makes !
me think that the story will be music, too. I liked the description of Dolly
and the peripheral nature of her existence. Her green eyes luminous as
mint jelly. I’m willing to allow this writer to draw me in because he seems
very sense-oriented and sensitive to nuance. Subtle but not threadbare
descriptions.
PASSAG E # 2 (silent reading) |
Riley Henderson, some tensions coming. Breakfast of chicken and cake. I
imagine chocolate cake. Contrast garland of bleeding squirrels. So much
violence underneath, as subtext.
Dolly in control. The tree house is getting to be a mess, what with chicken,
cake and the bleeding squirrels from Riley’s garland. But it’s earthy; they
all treat each other well. Or do so in the tree house? Catherine talks to
him [Rileyj and they understand? I thought she couldn’t be understood.
i
Born in China. And the China tree from the opening chapter. Hm.
"Quince" is underlined in this book. Significance. I get the overwhelming
266
sense of lime green, applied to skin color. Riley’s mother hated her
children. Riley is a wild kid. Took out an older girl and went to the
Dance-N-Dine. Fast track. Riley’s uncle gone to New Orleans to get a job
as Minister of Romance. These people live tumultuous lives.
I
"Floozy," a great concept. Circling the square on Sunday’s, this reminds me
of little towns in Mexico with everybody circling the square, hanging out.
Collin talks for a long time, descriptively, then inserts an impassioned:
"How I longed for him to be my friend!" Geez, childhood memories of my
own.
Collin seems marginal in society; Riley seems "with it" although always in
trouble. How Riley wants condoms and Collin doesn’t know what they are. I
PASSAG E # 2 (read aloud)
Oh, the food is from Sunday dinner.
Gunfire slapping through the woods, strong image. I
I
Dolly lowering her veil, a kind of Middle East modesty at play here.
"Roaming aim" a strong visual. I know what he means.
I’m picking up much more of the details in this reading aloud. The fact
that Riley’s family ate some squirrels last night for dinner, I missed this the
first time.
[I am dramatizing direct speech] i
[When I misread a sentence, I can quickly recover intonationally. Example:] j
"Catherine warned him that maybe it was a tree-house now, but it wouldn’t
be for long ..." [I misread the first part of the sentence]
[When Collin gets colloquial in his description, " I didn’t think he knew me
from dust," I tend to dramatize his narration, not unlike directly quoted
speech of other characters.]
[misread "brought" as "bought"]
Ah, quince is yellow. "Meaty" and "spinsterish" - I don’t know what that
looks like but it sounds great.
267
The multiplication table. I recall having to learn it. Then I match it with
Riley hopping around the yard reciting it, as punishment.
The mother sent to an institution on the Gulf Coast. I missed these details
on the earlier reading.
It’s awkward to read sections that are actually dialogue but are not in
quotations. I had less problem reading them silently, I think. Reading
aloud, I have to make the shift more strongly.
j
How can you "sock" someone "in the eye"?
On the first reading, I misread the passage where Riley circled the square.
Somehow I pictured him circling the square with the floozies, not with his
respectable sisters, as the passage reads. It doesn’t really change the i
passage impact much, because I get the message that Riley has two
conceptions of women, one for his sisters and one for girls he goes out with.
His sisters were under his strict surveillance.
{
Elizabeth has my sister’s name, so I see her with dark brown hair. '
Collin is not very reliable as narrator. Too subjective. He thinks Riley
thinks he is a fool because he didn’t know that Shadows were condoms. i
But I’m not convinced that Riley would never consider being friends with
him because of this.
Q UESTIO NS (on Passage # 2 )
a. I remarked some of the spots. I discovered more details in reading
aloud, because I had to read very word. I also got a stronger sense of the
characters, both by reading every word but also by reading their dialogue
aloud. More dramatic. j
b. Reading aloud did not really change the meaning of the passage.
c. I remember Collin’s interaction with Riley, because I just read it. I
remember the bloody garland of squirrels and the delicate control Dolly
exerts in the human interactions. I remember the description of Riley’s life, ;
his lunatic mother, his floozies, and his uncle Horace who Riley stood up to
and beat. I remember the Shadows at the drugstore. And a huge amount
of other details.
268
6. RE: the author. I know who Truman Capote is; I’ve seen him in films
and read articles about him. Though I haven’t read his other books, I know J
he wrote In Cold Blood and other novels. I know he’s gay, flashy, a tragic
figure. I did not think about this when I was reading, except maybe starting
out, where this image seemed to conflict with the image I was starting to
create for the author of this book. They didn’t seem the same person.
This did not seem to be written by the character portrayed in Life
magazine. So eventually I ignored it.
i
The author of the novel is sensitive, honest, has my kind of value system, is
like me.
ANOTHER NOTE: Often as I read, I found myself revising as I read the
pictures that I had in my imagination for certain scenes, as the details came
in. For example, there is a field by the tree house that I had to keep
changing as the story unfolded. At first, it was a grassy field, with a big i
grove of trees where the tree house was, then I had to add more geography
because all of a sudden, townspeople arrive on a road, and then there’s a '
stream nearby that I had to add, which disappeared later (in my
imagination) when it wasn’t needed anymore. Now as I think about it, the
field is still the same as the original image I had, and the road is there or
not there, depending upon if there are people on that road.

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