the suppression of my you and the tyranny of one-dimensional you.
She: Hello, thank you for doing this interview.
Her: Not a problem.
She: There is a freedom and a danger in not knowing who exactly you is.
Her: Yes. I have a general idea but I can never be sure of myself comprehensively.
She: How does this affect your voice as a writer? You is unconstrained but also can be misconstrued.
Her: Do you mean my voices? Do I know if my voices as a writer are as malleable as my speaking voices? Perhaps voice is like snowflakes and fingerprints--it is never the replicated, never the same voice twice. How could it be? We cannot step into the same river twice? Once an instant is over, it is over forever, not even in the mind is it the same. My voice is influenced, compounded, by the inflections given to it by the world. Even clothing is inconstant. Every time I wear my hat, it has new dirt on it, a new flaw, a new scent. Life, writing, voice, all of it, irreplaceable, unreplicable.
And my you is never unconstrained. There is always a format. And words can only be misconstrued outside of their context. I construe them one way, and that is my way. Another hears them differently, but correct for their context.
She: Your ideas reflect an acceptance of individual reality.
Her: Yeh, okay.
She: Tell me about the statement in your book, “I do collaborative writing with myself. I am all of us and we are the author.�
Her: Isn’t that one obvious?….Our idea of this uniform one-dimensional monument of the self might be more accurately depicted as a flexible mosaic structure that is continuously in flux, gently and ambiently and some times violently, even after death, partly meta, almost metabolic but more, mmm… you know. The whole identity corpus hovers out in the collective conscious like a huge ethereal blimp… and, that is always transmogrifying….ahem.
She: So, a decentered self implies that a defined “true� identity would be a more stable.
Her: Not at all. The single iconic notion of the author is a tyranny in the Humanities. It creates an arid climate, arid writing, arid speech. Arid, arid, ugh. Arid. My ictus of aridity.
She: In the sciences it is the norm that research articles are collaborative with 3,4 or more authors, but in the English departments, for example, we have a looming one-dimensional version of authorship.
Her: Amen sister, That is what I’m talkin about. So much possessiveness!
She: Her, thank you for talking with me today.
Her: Oh, She, it was absolutely a pleasure, to treasure, beyond measure, let’s hope it’s read in a state of leisure….Abientot!
Posted by wood0072 at December 10, 2005 6:44 PM
funny, i was just thinking about this -- or almost this -- earlier today. i wasn't focused on the singular author that's prevalent in the humanities, but still, i was thinking about the same thing.
i was finishing a "research" paper for an english class and i scanned over my "works cited" page. pages, actually. i cited a mess of folks. but i hesitate to call it research.
sure, folks with a historical bent are digging up forgotten "texts" and heretofore undiscussed works.
part of me wants to be a hard scientist. reseach = reproducible, measruable, peer-reviewed results. i'm comfortable calling that research. so, there are linguists who dothat kind of research. i'm sure there are some others in the humanities.
but mostly we're trafficking in ideas. big concepts. hidden meanings. unifying themes.
really abstract stuff.
and people don't generally cook that up in teams. they bounce ideas off friends and colleagues, but the don't do the bulk of their creative work as a team.
so, anyway, i think that's one big reason that the singular author is so common in our part of the academy.