In Sharon Daniel's "Public Secrets" there is an interesting and complicated form of heteroglossia at work. We see not only a double-double voiced discourse but a triple-voiced discourse. First and foremost we see Daniel as the author making her intentions know through the presentation of the pages of the essay and through the interviews themselves. The pages are designed to mingle the voices from "outside" and "inside" prison which creates an ambiguity for readers. This post modern presentation of the pages clearly show that Daniel thinks that in reality there is a separation of the voices inmates of the prison and people outside the prison when actually all voices should count for the same. Daniel also carefully selects small quotes to display to the reader as a summation of the entire interview. These include quotes like "this isn't a correctional facility, it's a penal colony" and "I haven't seen my kids since the night I was busted." Daniel again makes her intentions know through these quotes. They show a more specific instance of injustice in the prison.
It gets interesting when you actually look at the interviews themselves, though. In the interviews there is another more explicit form of double-voiced discourse. The women are not just giving a monologue about what the think, instead they are telling stories about things that have happened to them. In the course of doing so they engage in discourse with attorneys , guards, doctors, and other inmates. Usually the interviewees adopt the language of their characters to the best of their ability make them very dismissive. In that way their intentions become known: they are dismissed continually and they suffer many repercussions of that.
Now, if you take another step back, you can see that Daniel's conveys authorial intent in the interviewees while the interviewees convey authorial intent in the attitude of the figures in their stories. It follows that Daniel's authorial intent is also conveyed by the character's in the stories. So as a fun label for this type of double-voicedness we could call it triple-voiced discourse or a double double-voiced discourse. I'm sure the label doesn't matter too much though.
Anyway all this double-voiced discourse seems like it leaves a whole lot of room for bias. I don't mean to suggest that Daniel's critique is wrong (the merits of here argument are tangential to the point of this writing) but "Public Secrets" seems to constantly point back to the agenda of the author, Daniel, and may be less effective than an essay that is more objective.
2 comments:
Hmm, I'm not really sure if a more objective essay would really be more effective for the goal that Daniel seems to be going for with this project. I think hearing these women's voices, knowing their individual stories is important to empathizing with them (which I think is Daniel's goal, or at least it's the first step to achieving what her goal is). It's amazing the difference there is between reading an objective essay addressing the dehumanization of prisoners and hearing the stories of women who have gone through it. I will definitely agree that it leaves room for bias, and this is where the project is flawed. But I think getting people to view prisoners in a different light, as individuals with stories rather than a faceless mass of people is certainly a step in the right direction.
Yeah I agree with you. It seems like the only way to eliminate the erasure of these women's identities is to let them say exactly what they want to say without interruption. Just speaking hypothetically though, if this trend of interrupted critique of prisons were to continue in this manner and increase in popularity would we eventually be reading testimonies of prison guards and co. in the same light? Probably not but I like to think about trends in terms of long-term, hard pendulum swings.
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.