Life's A Stage....

Putting Sharon Daniel’s work in the terms of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia would be useful because it would be an easy way of explaining Daniel’s intentions with her work in regards to her use of multiple interviews and voice recordings.  Daniel’s intention in making this piece was obviously to communicate the terrible conditions and treatment of female prisoners in that specific, tri-prison area of California in order to point out to society not only the problems with that one location, but also to provoke thought about the effectiveness and justice of the prison system in general.  If Bakhtin’s definition of heteroglossia is described as “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way”, than Daniel’s authorial intentions to highlight the injustice of prison systems is refracted through the many vocally recorded interviews and transcripts.  She is using other voices within her work to reflect her own opinion.

However, while summing up the journalistic work with the term heteroglossia certainly makes an explanation easier, it doesn’t quite work because I don’t feel that a work like this really fits Bakhtin’s criteria of heteroglossia on one very key issue; the refracted multiple voices (the female prisoners) that Daniel (the author) is using does not come from one source.  In order for Bakhtin’s setup to work, I think, the multiplicity of voices must come from the same mind because in the novel disourse can go, “into individual argument and conversation between two persons, even while the exchanges in the dialogue are immanent to a single unitary language”.  Even though Daniel is using the testimony of female prisoners to highlight, support and reveal her own opinions, she is using outside sources that do not originate in her own mind.  Her mind started the provocative discourse of this piece, plays a key part in it to be sure, but she used other voices to finish it.  So for me, describing it in other terms of vocal multiplicity is easier, in fact preferable.

I would describe Daniel’s multiple-voiced interactions are legitimizing and verifying.  Since she is not merely using fictional characters to refract her opinions on the environment, love, war, or something else, she has to use other voices to back her up.  With a topic this serious, this accusatory of something real and working and concrete, it doesn’t work to stand alone, so you use the voices of others.  As far as analogies go, I see this setup of interviews and voices as a sort of play, with Daniel as the main character who doubly serves as narrator.  Her job in the story is to point out what’s wrong with these prison systems and the treatment of female prisoners before calling upon her supporting cast to come and finish the explanation where lack of firsthand experience fails her.  I know, I do too many theater analogies, but I would definitely describe Daniel’s use of multiple (and physically separate) voices as a sort of like-minded, legitimizing employment of a supporting cast, where the channels of refracted opinion are not made up characters, but real people.