Voice, Response 2: Elbow, Farmer, Harris

We were asked, this week, to respond to some tensions that surfaced in our readings of voice theories. I apologize for the immediate muck below, but I needed to do some wading.

So after reading all four of these pieces, what I still (after reading it first) appreciate about Elbow's introduction is his attempt to break down binaries in the discourse around voice, because they are everywhere. Farmer, for instance, sees his thinking in opposition to Elbow's because he uses Bakhtin and Vygotsky to argue for a selfhood that is constituted of other/outside voices, rather than a selfhood that is merely influenced by other voices. But though Farmer sees the socio-culturally formed, polyvocal self as one that is dichotomous to personal identity, I think that Elbow would argue that a writer can make use of both ideas.  Indeed, he argues that writers need not choose one extreme position—of holding fast to a voice that we feel honestly portrays our identity, or of rejecting the idea of a self and instead subscribing to social roles—but can instead choose to move between them. Such moves, he argues, develop more flexibility with and enrich our authentic voice, while they allow us to practice role-playing and heteroglossia. (Harris discusses work by James Moffett that seems to make similar moves, of moving self-expressive private writing to the public and engaging with an audience and purpose, p. 30).

Again, Elbow claims that his critical term "resonant voice" does not rely on any one theory of identity, or on the idea of a unified, "simple, single, unique, or unchanging" self (xxxiv). Instead, it points to "gaps" in meaning between the self, however you define it, and the unconscious. I wonder, though, if Farmer would accept this position as one that truly does work through and disrupt the either/or argument surrounding identity, or if he would still view it as a position that privileges the idea of an authentic self. Elbow does, after all, admit that it's difficult to define resonant voice apart from articulating how well a passage resonates with the self.

Harris makes an observation of Moffett that aligns more with Farmer, saying, "it seems clear that [audience and purpose] are almost an afterhthought to 'the composing of the mind' that he now sees as the real aim of writing" (30). Truly, Harris is making the case that it better serves our students' writing if we teach them to navigate discourses (competing social voices) and "locat[e] a situation that [they] can speak from, a position where [they] can see or do something new" (35). Harris discusses at length the problem of determining what exactly an "authentic voice" is. What makes one piece of writing more authentic than another?  (Elbow, for his part, readily admits that the idea of authentic voice is something wishy-washy, something felt.)  Though it may seem that coaching an "authentic" voice would help students find more original, expressive writing, Harris argues that student writing actually becomes more conventional when we point them toward expressive writing: the personal becomes conflated with the form of the personal essay.

In the case of Elbow, Harris admits that he "can't agree with him [Elbow] when goes on to argue that his goal in teaching has been to 'stick up for the personal in such a way as to simultaneously foster the social" (31) and refers to the "rhetoric of authenticity" implicit in Elbow-ian class workshops (32). But Harris is also responding to Elbow's classic expressivist work, books like Writing Without Teachers (1973) and Writing With Power (1981). (The excerpt we read was published in 1995, and presumably therefore more tempered and refined.) I wonder if Harris would be able to better agree with some of Elbow's stances had he read this piece from 1995.