“that listeners and readers get a sense of the real speaker and his or her virtue (or the absence of it) through the words on the page” (xvii).11 According to Elbow’s argument, the success of a piece is in large part determined by the personality of the writer finding its way onto the page (or into the speech) and, then, into the reader’s experience of that page. Consequently, in Stoehr’s and Elbow’s work on voice in writing, there is at least one common thread—the assumption that language can be used as a medium for capturing some essential part of the writer’s self on the page.
If we follow this assumption and apply it to the essay, then it seems easy enough to conclude that in the essay, the mind has a unique opportunity, due to the openness of the form, to take advantage of this conception of language. Imagine: there are no constraints in the form, and the language, itself (the tool for expression), is a veritable reflecting pool.12 There are at least a few operations that have to be working in order for the process to unfold, though, which I will trace out through an extended engagement with Peter Elbow’s work. Those operations include the following: the writer would have to reflect an essential part of his/her self into language, and the language would have to reflect back to the reader not just an image of the writer’s self, but some real, meaningful, powerful part of the writer’s self. To begin then, these operations lie in a very old theory of language.
Speaking in Writing: A Theory of Language
After giving an example of a “jargony piece of educational writing,” Elbow states, “[The writer] must have had a sense of the intended meaning and then constructed words to express it. The words lack breath or presence. […It] would take her an extra step of revising—and revising consciously for the sake of voice—to change her written words so as to break out of that language-construction into a saying-of-words on paper” (Writing With Power 288-289, emphasis in text). In sharing this quote with a few of my literature colleagues and my rhetoric colleagues, the response to it is consistent: it usually ranges from raised eyebrows to an audible “grrr.” When I share the same quote with my Creative Writing colleagues, the response is also consistent, but differently so: it usually ranges from a nod of the head to an audible, “duh!” This difference is interesting. It suggests that what is a given in one sphere is not in another, even though we all teach the same students from the same curriculum in the same department. To my mind, it is The fundamental difference between creative writing teachers’ and scholars’ conceptions of the writer-page relationship and literature teachers’ and scholars’ conceptions of the writer-page relationship. The source of that difference seems to be rooted in two different conceptions of language.
Expressivists, by definition, work from a philosophy of language that privileges the speaking subject, much like what I have found in the work of the French philosopher, Georges Gusdorf. In his work, Gusdorf is interested in the relationship between the writer and the text; he’s especially interested in that relationship with regards to creative nonfiction (e.g., autobiographical) texts, which is why I bring him into this discussion. His most famous and extensive study of that relationship is rendered in La Parole, which is a phenomenological philosophy of language that, to my mind, captures in readable and useful ways a logocentric theory of language (one that is reminiscent of the object of much of Jacques Derrida’s criticism).
In “Scripture of the Self: ‘Prologue in Heaven,’” Gusdorf argues that speech “is what constitutes the real and what founds identity” (113). He continues, saying that speech “initiate[s] being” (113). In the context of his larger work, I understand this claim to mean that speaking has the power to create a living, breathing entity, and that in the process of speaking, one can shape that being into an identity… but not just any identity. According to Gusdorf, the initiated being is an extension of the living, coherent, original speaker. This extension is possible because, according to Gusdorf, written or spoken language is consciousness, itself—“inner speech” made external, “expos[ing] the innermost human recesses to inspection and judgment” (113).
In Gusdorf’s model, after speaking, writing becomes “a second incarnation…” of the utterance of the speaker. He states, “[Writing] is the memory and the commemoration of spoken utterances, which thus will be able to confront the very one who, having spoken them, might very well have forgotten them” (114). So, in writing, the writer has the opportunity to study a finite form of the initiated being—which, in the case of creative nonfiction, is his/her self. To put this in phenomenological terms, in writing autobiographically, one discovers the self by making an observable object of it, but an object that is an extension of the original self. The key pay-off for Gusdorf in such a writing exercise is that it is only through the work of autobiography, in which he includes the essay (127), that we are able to search out our true selves, not in comparison to an other that is not us (like Adam does with Eve) but according to an other that is us.
This objectification of the self onto the page (the making of the flesh-and-blood writer into an “I” or “me” on the page) is important, key in fact, to the concept of voice. It is also responsible, as I will show in the coming pages, for voice’s failure to do what it is supposed to do—to express and empower the self of the writer. To explain how voice is supposed to empower writers, I turn now to some of Peter Elbow’s work on voice. In it, Elbow relies on a theory of language similar to Gusdorf’s (though he does not map it out explicitly, like Gusdorf does), and it is through that theory of language that Elbow argues that by writing—by making our inner speech (i.e., life force) external—we externalize the self. If this externalization is done adequately in writing, then the externalization is of the writer’s life source, which Elbow calls “resonant voice.”
Elbow states that resonant voice consists of words that “seem to resonate with or have behind them the unconscious as well as conscious” writer’s mind. As a result, the reader feels “a sense of presence with the writer” (“About Voice” xxxiv, emphasis in text), and that is where its power lies. Elbow is careful in his phrasing here. He says “a sense of presence,” as if to suggest that the experience is sensory, not necessarily scientific—i.e., predictable, objective, the inevitable consequence of a cause-effect relation. This carefulness in phrasing, tentativeness even, is typical of Elbow’s work on voice. It suggests that he is experimenting with the concept, that he is testing out an idea, practicing, perhaps, the very practices he teaches in his writing textbooks (e.g., the believing/doubting game). I note this in order to clarify the fact that Elbow’s investigations into and experiments with the concept of voice have yet to come to an end. He continually revises them. Thus, his work makes for a difficult object of study, as the object, itself, is often shifting and is still being revised. In this part of his ever-evolving exploration of voice, however, in the claim about words seeming “to resonate with or have behind them the unconscious as well as conscious” writer’s mind, one finds, again and obviously, an emphasis on the writer’s mind somehow being captured and made present in the text.13
This emphasis is interesting to the effort in this chapter to investigate the relation between the personal essay and the concept of voice in writing because it demonstrates the sometimes obvious (but often complicated) relationship between the ways in which one Expressivist, Peter Elbow, is emphasizing the writer’s mind-page relation and the ways in which personal essayists, too, have emphasized the same relation. In Elbow’s work and in the arguments about personal essays, this essential part of the writer (his/her mind) may be made present like an image in a mirror or made present in the aural qualities (the resonance) of the text, but the important point here is that the presenting of the mind on the page should be powerful enough that it impacts the reader: s/he sees it, feels it, and is affected by it, when s/he reads. To encourage that impact, Elbow advises writers to make careful choices about what kind of language they use. This advice is meant to help the student express the “invisible self”—a deeper self that exists behind or hidden within the apparent self, one that is full of power, that can extend itself beyond the physical boundaries of the flesh-and-blood writer, that can manifest in, for example, black squiggles on white pages. This self is, if framed in the discourse of and about the personal essay, the natural state of being that is so essential to the relationship between essayist
