5. Looking at Voice in Literacy in American Lives
In considering the affordances of literacy narratives that emerge from our encounters with students, our relationship with Deborah Brandt's work has been long and productive. In conceiving and beginning the work of LiteracyCorps, Brandt inspired us to inquire into the value of "literacy sponsors" as we read her writing about the literate lives of the people she has studied. Brandt's Literacy in American Lives (2001) is a collection of 80 oral histories of Americans who were born in the decades between 1895 and 1985. The book described, from the data of its collected stories, the changing social and economic pressures around literacy acquisition and use across generations. However, given the explicit goal of LiteracyCorps—to discover forms and meanings of sponsorship that may be less visible, not to locate practices across generational cohorts—our approach to documenting and mediating the voices of participants departed fairly significantly from the approach Brandt took in her work. For the purposes of her own investigation into patterns of sponsorship within generational cohorts, Brandt screened specifically for forms of literacy that would be most recognizable: "the acquisition and use of alphabetic script" (p. 9). Given this framing, it made sense that her screening should extend to the transcription of the stories collected. Brandt's focus is on linguistic variation largely characterized by "hesitations and misstarts," that is, by performance error, by "nuance" (p. 14). Brandt's methods of documentation and transcription of voices were entirely suitable for her purposes, but they do require that we take her at her word—that she, indeed, had "not flagrantly distort[ed] meaning as [she] understood it" (p. 14)—because all that we have access to is her transcription of the interviews, not the interviews themselves. Recorded voices don't stick to the printed, paper pages of books.
Brandt's editorial move, motivated by the need for her research to account for historical patterns and suited to the scope of her inquiry, takes the language of sponsors, be they of overt or covert prestige to her audience—those for whom she is attempting to render "greater clarity and efficiency" (p. 14)—and makes these sponsors speak the dialect of overt prestige. In eliminating the flaws in linguistic performance, however, this transcription makes the speakers and the ideas they communicate responsible to readers' needs for clarity and efficiency. In effect, their voices—and their attendant embodied expressions and affects—are subordinated to the researcher's narrative. These sponsors are already recognizable to readers by virtue of their defining characteristics. As Brandt's academic audience, we believe in the operations of scholarship and its mediation: traditional, alphabetic literacy. As Brandt explained, even if readers are trained in linguistic transcription, as she is not, such transcription would likely afford even the linguists less clarity and efficiency. Further, marking some speakers with phonetic transcription and not others, marks outsiders visibly—and, as outsiders, potentially unfavorably. Although Brandt's standardizing is done in the spirit of "evenhandedness" (p. 14), this same standardizing sees to it that all participants in her study, regardless of the variety of language they speak or their social purposes in speaking that variety, enjoy the markings of overt prestige.
As a result of Brandt's efforts to remove the marked (and distinguishing) auditory features of what her participants say, the voices that emerge in her written representation are those that never existed. No person, apart from the author—Brandt herself—ever said those things in that way. Readers are asked to imagine that these words came from the mouths of real persons, real persons with real voices (audible and metaphorical). However, the voices that readers are led to summon belong to no correspondingly real persons. They are fictions through and through. The phantom narrator in the heads of readers cannot conjure an accurate, indexical speaker in the world—not due to the fault of the reader's stultified imagination, but through the sleight of hand being performed by the author. The magician drops a quarter in her pocket only to pull it from the ear of an audience member. The implication is that it is the same quarter. But it's not; we've just been led to regard it as the same.
Audible voices invoke—index—a real, whole, unique, human being—often without even attempting to do so. It is hard not to see James Earl Jones (or Darth Vader or Mufasa) when we hear his voice. It is, after all, his voice. However, an edited and quoted passage in alphabetic text attributes origin of an idea and utterance, but it does not, necessarily, invoke—index—a real, whole, unique, human being. There is no body.
Further, marking some speakers with phonetic transcription and not others, marks outsiders visibly—and, as outsiders, potentially unfavorably. Although Brandt's standardizing was done in the spirit of "evenhandedness," this same standardizing sees to it that all participants in her study, regardless of the variety of language they speak or their social purposes in speaking that variety, enjoy the markings of overt prestige. How would it change what we would want to report? What kinds of information would our new filter—the video cameras, microphones, and editing software—be best at capturing? What kinds of stories would we most likely be able to tell with these new reading, writing, and researching tools? How would the cameras change what we would want to know, what we would ask, and what we would want to tell?
Our new questions began to congeal as a claim that video would change more than just how we would interpret what people said; it would change what and how we would see—and hear. With the means for audio documentation in hand—video cameras—we could stop worrying about transcription—about moving spoken language and performance exclusively into standardized, alphabetic text—since digital video demands no such additional layer of mediation to provide clarity and efficiency for its audience. While the voices we would collect in our footage would be marked, significantly, by our collecting and editing choices, sharing it with others would not require our acts of transcription—or even description. Sharing what we found would not require us to speak for them—at least not in the audiovisual products we would generate. Rather, it would enable us to speak through them: creating a third voice, a product of the original speaker and the editors. Furthermore, the resulting edited video products would enable us to show actions and interactions that we would otherwise be required to describe in alphabetic text.