Voice Week 3: Bowden

This week we read Darsie Bowden's The Mythology of Voice, a book that works to problematize the metaphor of voice and argue that despite its important work with authorship, identity, narrative, and power, "as a metaphor, it has outlived its usefulness" (viii).

The work of Bowden's book is comprehensive: she traces voice's importance to the field of literature (narratology); the histories of thought in literature, rhetoric, and discourse theories that have given voice rise; its importance in the shift from speech to writing; and the trends in U.S. writing pedagogy that have made voice so popular and enduring a concept. Having established this sense of origin and trajectory, Bowden then works with applications of voice. She discusses the potential for working with a more social conception of voice that doesn't rely on "authentic voice" and doesn't limit the social function of language; she also works with material, embodied, "literal" dimensions of voice ("re-voicing") that are removed from voice metaphors and, she feels, be of great value to writing pedagogy. Last, we read her chapter on the role of voice in the discourse of women's studies.

Because it was so comprehensive, Bowden's book overlapped with, filled out, or otherwise informed the reading we've done so far this quarter. (And being so opposed to the pervasive use of voice metaphors in composition and literature, Bowden serves as an interesting counterweight to other proponents of voice.) In this context, I was particularly interested in Bowden's strongly articulated separation of voice as metaphor from voice as embodied practice or utterance. It was an interesting contrast to see Bowden work so hard to separate the two when so much of Elbow's defense for the importance of voice and its baring of our identity was linked to the physical production of voice. For instance, when working to divorce voice from identity and recognition, Bowden writes,

as is readily apparent by now, spoken language can reveal the speaker in a way that writing cannot. We can locate the source of sound; the physicality of voice identifies the speaking person. A listener can identify not only who speaks but a great many other attributes of the speaker that influence the meaning of the speech exchange (the speakers fluency, mood, emphasis, age, gender, health, sobriety, etc.). Writing is much more problematic because the author, as a physical presence, is separated from her text; she is absent from the scene of reading of a text that she has most likely had the luxury to revise. (64)

For Elbow, the physicality behind vocal production and the writer's use of voice seemed inexorably bound; for Bowden, the two are entirely different ideas—and in fact, she seems to think that embodied voice has potentially useful pedagogical implications, unlike the metaphor of voice. For example, while Elbow maintains that the work of subvocalizing a text as we read is one reason we may "hear" a "voice" when reading, Bowden envisions a view of reading that recognizes the role of visual reading practices that complicate/work with aural reading practices (i.e, readers interpret physical codes as sounds and inflections). Bowden also cites studies that hypothesize that perhaps we're not physically subvocalizing as we read, but simply anticipating/imagining the physical movement behind forming the words we read (which would be easy to do because we're so habituated to speaking).