Agency & Literature. What Does it Mean?

  I really wanted to talk about agency as a concept in and of itself and to step outside of our discussion of Sojourner Truth and Frances Gage. Agency, as discussed in our class references a kind of linguistic agency, as in the agency of self-expression through the use of language. I will be exploring this through the works of Ong, Campbell and Gilbert and Gubar. It is also important to note that this must not be the only form of agency and I think that understanding the very specific nature of the definition we are talking about will help further illuminate and clarify the theories and ideas presented in this section.

To begin with, I would like to look at Ong's article "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction." This article is critical to understanding exactly what linguistic agency is and what it means for literature, both of which are very salient issues for our class. Ong proposes that writers create an audience for themselves when they go about writing anything and this created part must then be assumed by the reader (Ong, 12). This implicates questions of the reader's agency because "they have to adjust when the rules change" (Ong, 12). Is also raises a second question about the author: "If and when he becomes truly adept, an 'original writer,' he can do more than project the earlier audience, he can alter it" (Ong, 11). This proposes that the writer must struggle to both propose his own agency in regards to the control of his own work (creating a truly original approach) and also in the control of others (how others are forced to perceive or read a piece). With this information, two things again become important: First, that agency in this sense is entirely linguistic. It involves asking others to accept a certain form of speaking and meaning. Second, that agency is limited to an extent. As Ong mentions later in his article, the demands of a given author (Hemingway in this case) can exceed the linguistic bounds of their actual audience (say a 16th century one) and result in a refutation of legitimacy (Ong, 15). This would then mean that linguistic agency is highly contextual, which agrees quite strongly with both Campbell and Gilbert and Gubar.

Campbell proposes five aspects of linguistic agency which are that it "(1) is communal and participatory...(2) is "invented" by authors who are points of articulation; (3) emerges in artistry or craft; (4) is effected through form; and (5) is perverse, that is, inherently...open to reversal" (Campbell, 2). It is important to note that by her third point Campbell is specifically referring to Aristotle's proposition that "Art is...a reasoned habit of mind in making...things that can be other than what they are" (Campbell, 6). However, what is really salient out of all this is the first, second and fifth points of Campbell. Linguistic agency is communal and participatory. It must be, otherwise language would be utterly useless. A simple thought experiment is to imagine yourself face-to-face with an alien who has never before been to earth, let alone heard its languages and you must communicate with him. To establish any kind of meaning you would have to work together to find gestures that might translate. The same is true of language as a whole, though it is not often thought of in the same way. The minds of individuals are, to a certain extent, aliens that work together to form an understanding of "gestures" that have, over thousands of years, translated into words and later into letters. This covers both points one and two while implying the fifth. If language is constantly being agreed upon, certainly it can be changed. Here, I think, is where the issue of agency begins to form. Who has the power to change language? Who has the power to re-frame how a reader reads a text or an audience hears a speaker?

These are the central questions of linguistic agency and vital, I believe, to our analysis of the theory we read about this kind of agency. Gilbert and Gubar highlight this concern beautifully in the chapter "Infection of the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship" of The Madwoman in the Attic. The concern of these two women over the "anxiety of influence" or even of authorship becomes a very legitimate concern when viewed in light of the previous questions and I think it is through these kinds of lenses that the rest of the texts should be analyzed if not done so already.