What might have been...

I wasn't able to complete this third SCD, but I was considering writing it about the problem accessing statements unveiled by potentially liberating literary devices such as irony presented in Booth's "Morality of Narration."

My own experience reading "Public Voices" was the catalyst which prompted me to consider Booth's commentary on the problems of irony. I know little about the prison system in the U.S.A., and when some of the women would use prison terminology or when a woman gave voice to the implied prisoner in an ad campaign which worked by showing an injured prison guard (I think, I didn't understand the term), I became confused.  Without knowing more about the "outside" opinions of prison systems, I had no way of seeing the outside and inside merge. This reminded me of Booth's comments on "Lolita" in that he saw Nabokov's story relying on an assumed reader which did not exist in reality. His assumed the reader knew enough about his argument for piety that he didn't need to explain them in the actual novel. Irony is a powerful tool as Killingsworth explained in that it reveals the author's opinions on certain issues by hiding the issue and forcing the reader to see it develop in the gaps between what's know and what's said. The reader thus co-constructs the statement with the author. If the reader does not have all the clues, however, the opinion becomes misconstrued, and the hidden irony becomes dangerous. The hypertext, especially as exemplified in "Public Voices" might be a solution to this problem, however.

The nature of "Public Voices" doesn't try to submerge the outside by removing mentions of opposing opinions from the interviews. For instance, a reader might not know what ad campaign the prisoner is referencing, but the author never interrupts the interview to explain.  Submerging the "outside" would be displacing "the outside" and replacing it with "inside", setting them up again in a hierarchical binary. The presentation of these interviews keeps the content of the interview intact, unedited. Though the author does provide descriptions of the outside world (I recall her briefly detailing an impoverished neighborhood in the introductory audio), she never attempt to speaks for those with the opinion of keeping the prison systems as they are. This further reveals  the nature of "Public Voices" as a hypertext not merely within itself but within the network of all information available on the issue. Because Daniel never explains the prison terminology or references to other discussions on the topic of prison systems herself, if the listener wants to fully understand the prisoner's commentary, he or she has to go outside the essay to find information on what's referenced. The essay's presentation as a website within the network of the Internet further lends itself to this kind of mobility. A reader can easily open up another window and search for information on the ad campaign I mentioned above.

Though I didn't know much about the prison systems before listening to "Public Voices" and might have been considered a "nonparticipating 'third person'", engaging with the essay caused me to become participant not only the text itself but the whole issue at hand. My "lexia" before reading "Public Voices" was limited in its knowledge on prison systems, but this lexia was expanded after reading the essay and continues to expand as I discover more about the issue. (Landow 36)

If Nabokov had been trying to make a statement on the romance novel through the irony of "Lolita", the accessibility of the statement relied on the reader's prior knowledge of the romance genre. Booth explains that if Nabokov had intended to demonstrate the unreliability of the narrator in "Lolita" by believing his readers were "pious", then he was being rather "naive" (391). In not framing the opinions of the opposition in her own words, Daniels forces readers to seek out information through other nodes. Neither her voice or essay come to be represented as the "tyrannical, univocal voice" of the entire issue. "Public Voices" encourages the listener to seek out the issue from different sources by not framing the interviews with the author's voice. Nabokov submerges his statement under the unreliable voice of the narrator, thus making the issue he wishes to address less accessible. Daniel's essay as a hypertext is more accessible in that it allows entry not only into its story but into the whole issue.