Story And Voice: Meditations on Community
Act I, Scene 1
The dingy yellow radiator occasionally clunks, a poster hangs precariously on its last thumbtack off of a overflowing cork board, and every where the air is filled with the dry powdery scent of chalk that has been collecting in the carpet, the wood trim, the areas above shelves that are skipped when dusting, and even in the clothes of children that hang in washrooms toward the back. No one really notices this, though…except one person. He sits in the back wearing a plaid shirt and tennis shoes that are only laced halfway up. The jeans he wears jeans are from WalMart and his sandy blonde hair is matted down on one side of his head. Most of the time he is quiet, silently observing everything else going on around him. He watches two girls get up to go talk to another girl. He catches a friend of his out of the corner of his eye go to sharpen a pencil at the grey crank sharpener bolted to the door frame. In front of him is a mess of paper; mostly torn from a green spiral notebook he keeps stashed inside his pop-up desk. His handwriting is awkward and nearly illegible, something his sixth grade teacher had reminded him about earlier in the year. In a bit he is going to go share what he has written on it with the teacher. For the moment, however, he is lost to his senses taking in the swirling hustle and bustle of a class humming with activity.
Act I, Scene II
It is early fall and the stuffiness left over from the hot afternoon has not yet left the building, despite every window in the cramped room being opened. Inside, eleven adults sit around four uneven tables pushed together to make one very large square. There are papers strewn all over the table, some in neat piles, others arranged as though they were playing cards being set down on a blackjack table. There is a seriousness that is accentuated by the amplified sound of papers being shuffled and thoughtful murmurs being exchanged. There is a young man sitting at the corner of the large square. He is wearing a black t-shirt, jeans, and sits in total silence as others pour over the typed manuscript in front of them. These are the rules of the workshop: the author may not speak. Next to him sits a teacher who dresses as though she were a thoughtful senator's wife. She has just flown back from giving a reading in New York. Later that week she will fly to Los Angeles to give another reading. Across from her sits a retired preacher who lives in a retirement community. Next to him sits a blonde, waife-like twenty something graduate student who is wearing a low cut t-shirt and metallic bracelets. The rest of the class is just as uniform. Before them is a fragmented piece about this particular young man's mentally disabled older sister. No one dares refer to her as "his" sister. Instead, any reference to this young man is replaced by the term "the author's." As the discussion goes on, the young man finds himself looking out the window into a courtyard as a chilly breeze pulls red leaves off a mushroom shaped Serviceberry tree.
Act II, Scene I
The reason I have written about the above scenes is that they are both about me. Not only are they both about writing, but also they are both about writing in a community. And while there are other similarities I'm sure (mostly revolving around my interaction in the community), the differences between the two scenes are the ones that I find most illuminating. Here we have a contrast between production and analysis, between children and adults, between the act of writing and the act of reading, and, most importantly, between the metaphors of voice and narrative. While notion of community is requisite for both scenes, how community is employed and for what purpose could not be any more different. The rest of this play is about how two different theorists, Donald Graves and Barbara Kamler, depict a writing community and the implications this has on a larger theoretical scale. I want to re-read the function of community through the lens of a larger democratic project and to ultimately argue that the loss of voice as a metaphor impoverishes notions of democracy.
Act III, Scene I
I can only imagine the din that Graves unleashed in his classrooms of children. Graves even addresses this as one of the most common questions he gets from teachers (115). What to do about the noise? This recognition of noise as a potential problem is also a recognition that how Graves is suggesting a class be set up is a departure from normalcy. In the class Graves describes, students are free to stand up and go discuss things with classmates when they please, they are able to move around the classroom to get materials when they need them, and they are free to speak with the teacher when the teacher is available and not with another student (116,117). This was exactly the scene I found myself in as a sixth grader at Lincoln Elementary School in Cedar Falls, Iowa.
There is something messy about how all this works. Students are not working with each other on a single, unified project. There is no great classroom goal that is trying to be reached. Instead, students bounce around off each other. Every individual student has their own individual project, complete with the project's own individual demands and requirements. One student might need help with where the plot is going in a story. Another student might not be able to clearly describe a scene she wishes to include in their non-fiction. Yet another student may simply not like how the ending to his piece sounds.
There are two things that are striking about this arrangement. One, there seems to be an implicit understanding that each student, during the process of writing and revising, will encounter problems that are unique or situational to the specific set of circumstances surrounding whatever writing they are working on. Students have to be allowed to move at their own discretion simply because there is no unified "project" and, consequently, no universal answers that would be the same for everyone. Second, this arrangement only works if it is understood that, while everyone may have unique interests and needs, that others are nonetheless able to understand and assist each other, and in fact, learn from seeing others work through problems that may not be shared.
Graves himself articulates this very early in his book. On page 19, he lists a number of conditions necessary for these approaches to work. Number one is that "there are no right or wrong answers. What you seek is the child's version of events." Clearly, Graves sees an intimate connection between writing, truth, and each individual student. In this sense, the concept or metaphor of voice is one that is patently not shared among the classroom community. Every student is understood to have different, sometimes competing, wants and needs. These wants and needs presumably come from everything from different tastes and interests to socio-economic, racial, and gender differences. In short, Grave's classroom community recognizes that every student is such a potent mixture of highly individualized circumstances that it is fundamentally impossible to try to reduce them to one simple common denominator.
Act III, Scene II
It is a scenario that nearly any poet, novelist, or memoirist who has had contact with the peculiar traditions of creative writing in academia would be familiar: the author watching a group as though the author was not there; a disassociation from the poem/story/non-fiction piece; a refusal to acknowledge the presence of the author in the room; and an implied understanding that the piece they are reading is a mere representation of the author and is, consequently, completely and totally open for commentary and critique with out fear of offending the author or the author's life. Kamler's depiction of her writing group in Chapter 3 is a depiction of a community searching something inside language as a means to create some sort of understanding of the larger world outside the walls of their meeting space. This is the "community" of writers that I have found myself being a part of for the past seven years.
Kamler is explicit about her move away from voice. There just wasn't much you could do with voice. As she notes, "If the teacher treats the text as truth, as the real expression of the individual writer (whose identity is received, unitary, and stable), then she is loath to touch it. She can create no space to intervene and no rational for why she could meddle with 'you'"(64). To her, this step is an essential step in being able to conceive of teaching writing as a political action. Being unable to speak about a piece because it was tied to the individual writer through the metaphor of voice means that it also loses its potential to serve as a site for transformation. For Kamler and her group of ageing female writers the goal was "to develop a collective understanding of the discursive processes that have shaped ageing women in their specificity and their difference" (74). In this community, individuality (voice) is handed over to the community to serve as a vessel for discussion and understanding (text). In Kamler's community, the purpose is not to celebrate unique differences and purposes, but to come to a common understanding of meaning and value. As she writes, "For us, it was crucial to have a social, cultural and political reference point outside the self in order to contextualise what seemed to be idiosyncratic in larger patterns of power" (74). Community, in this sense, is employed as a tool to manufacture consensus among individuals through discourse.
Act IV
What a community is employed to do is significant if we want to talk about the nature of democracy. On one hand, there are theorists who see conflict as an enemy of any democratic society. These "third way" and "deliberative democracy" theorists such as Jurgen Habermas and politicians such as Tony Blair and even Bill Clinton seek to employ community as a means to promote unity and harmony in society. By doing so, conflict is transcended opening the way for a more "democratic" way of living. The manufacturing of consensus is necessary for this project in that it seeks to find commonality in diverse groups.
While this rhetoric seems hopeful and egalitarian, critics of this stance worry that what is really going on is not a freedom from conflict, but rather a removal of dissent. The goal, then, is to not truly transcend conflict, but rather to remove the visibility of discord in society. The deeper danger is that what constitutes the "correct" version of harmony and political stability often falls in line with concepts of hegemony (See especially Laclau and Mouffe). To these theorists, what needs to be erected is a hegemony of agonism, or a culture in which differences are cultivated but are done so with a deep respect for the worth of the "other." This is in sharp contrast to the antagonism that many "third way" thinkers simply want to do away with. In other words, it isn't the conflict itself that is the problem, but rather how we deal with this conflict.
While I certainly don't think it is Kamler's intent to remove all conflict, I do think that the loss of voice as a metaphor is a very dangerous direction to go in. As we saw in Grave's workshop, voice is irreducible. Voice is an element that cannot be molded into consensus or an agreed upon substance. Voice resists consensus. The loss of voice opens the possibility of manufactured consensus and consent. In a sense, the presence of voice as a metaphor prevents unity and social harmony. Tied in with voice is a notion that differences and conflict are inevitable and, even more, are beneficial in some sense. The allowance of voice is a means in which everyone can find a place in a community with out having to sacrifice who they are in order to "fit in." Voice as a metaphor helps to resist the tendency of one system of values becoming the dominant system in which everyone else eventually must cohere with.
All too often it seems as though everyone recognizes something magical and hopeful in Grave's writings, but later dismiss it as silly and childish. What I am trying to articulate is that there is something incredibly powerful, pertinent, and utterly serious about the concept of voice in writing classrooms. The metaphor of voice carries with it the hope for a democratic society that is democratic simply because people are able to participate in it as they are. In this sense, it is open and pluralistic. Democracy is not something that is created, but something that is lived. In this regard, it only makes sense to retain the metaphor of voice as a very powerful tool in the teaching of writing.