11. Looking at Voice in A Place to Stand
As an author of an ethnographic text (A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar, 2002), Julie is familiar with these ethical dilemmas of representation—since, in creating that work, she was faced with the task of rendering the voices of the participants in her research as she heard them in both in interviews and in naturally occurring conversations at the bar that served as the location for her research into argument and performance. Since Julie was interested in describing arguments as speech events framed by markers of performance, she elected an approach to transcribing voices similar to (and in some ways, inspired by) Kathleen Stewart's (1996): She tried to recreate the poetic qualities of speech visually, through such devices as strategic spacings, line breaks, ellipses, and dashes. While she also preserved some features of marked speech generated in interview situations, there are fewer ethnopoetic transcription features present in those renderings—commensurate with the less explicitly performative nature of those speech events. Julie has an embodied memory of the ethical pressures of those decisions—including the ones having to do with how to represent the voices of her barroom interlocutors in relation to her own voice as participant in those scenes and as author of the resulting ethnographic text.
In telling one story in particular—one in which she made very different decisions about voicing—she faced a set of representational challenges of voicing that, while different, occupied the same ethical territory. In Tales of the Field, sociologist and ethnographer John Van Maanen (1988) described several genres of ethnographic storytelling: realist tales, confessional tales, and impressionist tales, each defined by its rhetorical relationship to referentiality, scene, meaning, and perspective. Whereas "realist tales" claim to offer up journalistic verisimilitude ("I was there and documented things just as they were, and as anyone would have seen them"), and "confessionist tales" narrate the author's motives, experiences, and affective states ("I was there as myself, here's what it was like for me, and here's what my particular experience reveals"), "impressionist tales," the most unabashedly poetic of the ethnographic genres, use literary techniques to render an embodied experience of "thereness" for the reader, an impressionist view of people, place, and scene. Impressionist tales "present the doing of fieldwork rather than the simply the doer or the done" (p. 102) and strive to create the fullness of experience via partial truths.
In A Place to Stand, Julie used all three of the ethnographic genres Van Maanen described to tell the story of the social life of the Smokehouse: The second chapter of the book, "A Place in the Middle: Behind Bar at the Smokehouse," was written as an impressionist tale. Of her intentions in making space for such a tale, Julie wrote that she presents it "in an effort [not only] to orient the reader to the particularities of place and personae but [also] to affirm the truth that narrative is in some ways best suited to render phenomenological densities, [and] to show how a field of signification shot through with contradictions coheres as a cultural text" (Lindquist, 2002, p. 20). She explained that even though the narrative is "woven from actual events … recorded as field notes through long-term participation and observation, it is a synthetic story of people and events, a story deliberately constructed to convey both the complex and the predictable in Smokehouse life" (p. 20, emphasis added). Here is an excerpt from "A Place in the Middle," which narrated a common afternoon (first shift, from a bartender's point of view) scene at the bar:
As I hoist the ice buckets up onto the bar, I notice that another customer, Roy, has arrived and is drinking a beer. I see that Tom, too, is on his second beer; the empty bottle has been been pushed to the outer ledge of the bar.
"Oh, hey, sweetheart," says Roy. "I saw you were busy, so I just grabbed us a coupla these." He holds up his bottle and then indicates a pile of bills on the bar. "Here, take out for 'em." But I apologize for my absence and tell him the beers are on me. "If there's one thing I like," remarks Roy, "it's a woman that got legs like that buys me a beer." It is a common practice for bartenders to "buy" customers drinks to amend some error or indiscretion, or when the customer has proven his loyalty as a patron by spending most of his roll at the bar—but it seems as if lately, Roy, a regular customer, says the same thing every time I buy him a drink. I am told that he makes the same remark, over and over again, to all the bartenders. The phrase has come to characterize Roy as much as, say, the St. Louis Cardinals cap he always wears to proclaim his disdain for the Cubs, Chicago's yuppie Northside team. (pp. 28–29)
In this impressionist tale, the speech rendered is not the representation of a vocalization made by a particular person at a certain place in time, but rather, voiced by characters. The voice, in this case, is attributed to a composite, and (though it was, in fact, an utterance made and recorded in fieldnotes as a event) is displaced from any actual speaker. Here, "Roy" speaks on behalf of the oft-spoken, but does not index an actual person—one person, that is. In this way, the "voice of Roy" is a scenic device, conveying information about the kind of place the Smokehouse is, the people who go there, the local economy of the place, the everyday routines of the bar, the relationship of bartenders to customers, gender roles, regional identifications, and so forth. There is voicing, but no real voice. Whereas Deborah Brandt (2001) elided voice in her rendering of participants' speech, and Stewart (1996) tried to invoke it, Julie attempted here to dislocate it in order to do the more scenically efficient work of voicing.
One way to make rhetorical and ethical decisions visible as decisions is to compare the implications and effects of different strategies of transcription, inscription, and narration—as we have done here. In looking to strategies of voicing in Literacy in American Lives (Brandt, 2001), A Space on the Side of the Road (Stewart, 1996), and A Place to Stand (Lindquist, 2002), we can see a range of authorial orientations to embodied voices as produced by real speakers, a range of ways of representing them for ethical and rhetorical purposes. To claim an impressionist tale is to disclaim any responsibility for indexicality; to announce realism is to call attention to the intended accuracy of the representation. In no case, however, is there not a sleight of hand at work.
Another way to make these decisions visible is to make them audible—that is, through a consideration of sound, which makes present the absences created by disembodiment.