Authentic Voice of the Illiterate

During the exercise we started in class on Wednesday, I was given a quote from Campbell that goes as follows:

“What historian Nell Irvin Painter fails to understand is that Gage’s fiction has a dramatic agency as a performative text that is greater than historians’ fact.  We can never recover the authentic voice of the illiterate; inevitably that voice is transformed by those who record it as they hear it,… We can only struggle to recreate its immediacy,…  Without Gage’s artistry, which gave Truth’s speech dramatic form, we could not participate in what we imagine to be the ordinary moment or experience the play of ideas, the metaphors, or the interaction between Truth and her opponents."

                Campbell pg. 13-14

I found this quote to be very interesting in relation to our conversation regarding the agency of nature in relation to “ecoporn” as well as the agency of children with disabilities.  It is the concept of the “authentic voice of the illiterate” that stood out to me.  Is Campbell arguing, here, that we will never be able to recover the voice of those that history subjugates? It is an interesting argument, in my opinion and one that may help understand why the heavily influenced and diminished agency of the two aforementioned groups exists as it does.  Why does the agency of these particular groups draw the attention of the writers of history so heavily though?  I suppose that, as we mentioned in class, that both the groups in question lack the capacity to form solid argumentation for their own exhibition of agency.  This lack of the capacity to for an outward expression of agency causes others to jump in and dictate it for them…  What I find so interesting about this conceptually is the idea that once taken away, the voice of these groups may never again be discovered.  What do you think?  Is Campbell correct about this?