Trying to Understand Agency/Artistry Using a Prism.

  In class on Friday, we talked a lot about the various agents involved in the Sojourner Truth case study (as recalled by Campbell). So far, the prism analogy that Campbell quotes from Burke at the beginning of part II (Campbell, pg. 5) has been the most helpful for me to understand how agency operates on an individual basis. And though I'm inclined to contemplate "the light" I see from the prisms around me, and to attempt to trace each of them back to some original source, which is essentially what I see as the heart of the struggle highlighted in Gilbert and Gubar (i.e. the anxiety of the author), I will try to focus primarily on Campbell's case study of Sojourner Truth / Dana Gage.

   If we consider the speech Truth gave at the 1851 woman's rights convention as a sort of "original source of light" (though it is, of course, just one of an infinite procession of earlier refractions), it seems relatively clear to me that if there was no transcript of the event, the immediacy of the audience, each member of it an individual prism, becomes a potential source of reflecting the least filtered account of the event. Now, what each "prism" reflects will be based on an impossibly complex number of variables, and will change from person to person. In other words, people will remember different things, emphasize different aspects, etc. This, to me, is at least partially what Campbell is talking about when she refers to a "performance that repeats with a difference" (Campbell, pg. 7). It's important to remember that in her view, "artistry is not limited to a canon of masterworks but emerges equally in apt vernacular speech and everyday talk" (Campbell, pg. 7). Therefore, one could argue, even the simple recounting of events can contain a level of artistry, and certainly a degree of agency.

   So the question came up in class: Why, if it is common knowledge that the speech by Sojourner Truth was fabricated by Gage, do people still connect with the fictive work? This is where the role of artistry comes in. I'm reminded of Hunter S. Thompsons' Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which was originally meant to be an account of a race in the desert for Sports Illustrated, but ultimately turned into a tale of Thompsons' own drug-filled adventure, which we all surely know by now (or should!). That, to me, is a perfect example of the role artistry has in a situation like this. Truth and accuracy has much less to do with the matter than, perhaps, we are comfortable admitting. (Keep in mind part V of Campbell's work, in which she points out that agency can be a source of evil and harm.) What I mean to say is that in the end, we don't care what really happened at that race in Las Vegas, just as we don't really care what accent Sojourner Truth spoke with, or what words she used. Dana Gage captures the moment with a level of artistry that, for better or worse, continues to resonate with readers.

   The one thing that troubles me about using this prism analogy to understand agency, is that while it's a beautiful way to understand an otherwise slippery concept, it does very little for me in terms of solving that puzzling relationship between the author and the audience. In fact, it seems like the more I come to understand how much agency everyone has in this equation (Sojourner Truth, the audience, Gage, Campbell, this blog post, etc.), the less I understand where one agent ends and another begins.