Responding to Question 1. Thinking back to pp. 324-325 in Bakhtin's "Discourse in the Novel," what would be the usefulness of justifying Daniel's essay according to this notion of heteroglossia? What other ways can you describe the multiple-voiced interactions in Daniel's text (notusing heteroglossia, or not using Bakhtin's language)?
Defining Daniel's project "Public Secret" in terms of Bakhtin's heteroglossia is advantageous for a number of reasons. First, Daniel's project seems to have been perfectly crafted to explore Bakhtin's principle of heteroglossia. Bakhtin states, "Heteroglossia... is another's speech in another's language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way" (324). This is exactly the experience of maneuvering Daniel's piece the each of the women on the inside's discourses about various injustices of the prison system cooperate with Daniel's authorial voice and intention. They play off one another again quoting Bakhtin, "It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author" (324). To illustrate this point we have the woman inmate Genae powerful expression about how her alias in prison removes her from getting to know other inmates. Genae's speech reflects her intention of speaking with this trusted advisor about the her detrimental emotional experience in prison, while Daniels inclusion of this discourse in her project reflects her intention on shedding light on the humanity within these people, and the alienation the prison system thrives on in both separating the inside from the outside, and then further alienating the inmates from one another.
This last point draws on an important undercurrent in Bakhtin's theory of heteroglossia. We are only allowed to experience these refracted voices of "characters," because of the author's language which incorporates their voices. In this way the only reason we are able to listen to these womens' testimonies is because of Daniel and her authorial agency. This seems like a relatively simple concept, but we are forced to ask ourselves, would we or other people who view this project have experienced these testimonies differently without Daniel's framing of the project. I think these voices are discredited by most of American society and so their discourse is only taken as seriously as the person who presents them to society and the form in which they are presented. I find this fact problematic, but I think these individual stories would carry a much lighter weight without the author's interaction and organization of them into a unified purpose of exploring the injustices of the prison system.
1 comment:
I find it interesting that you mentioned Daniel and her "authorial agency" when it came to her task of bringing these testimonies to the readers, because that didn't really occur to me as I was answering this question myself. I made a point of saying that this work didn't really fit Bakhtin's definition of "heteroglossia" because the multiple voices did not come from Daniel's own mind but from external and physically separate sources. I think I saw that as a sort of dependence on her sources, but when you mentioned the phrase "authorial agency" I was forced to rethink of it as a new kind of strength. A weakness by heteroglossia standards I suppose, when it comes to creativity and originality, but as a piece of intense and challenging journalism its a great strength to have claim to the fact that she did indeed bring these sources to us, with effort and intent.
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