Gage built this fictive text upon fragments of things said and done by Truth, fragments that "illustrate the communal basis of Truth's agency" but ultimately combine to form a rhetoric that is not authentically Truth's (12). It is successfully stirring in its drama, which may account for Truth's "pragmatic decision" to include Gage's text in her Narrative (9). Nonetheless, the rewritten aspects (including a stereotypical southern black dialect that, according to Campell, Truth did not even speak) and embellishments of Truth's speech is, if not a misquotation, a misrepresentation. Gage has essentially put words into the mouth of someone who has become a historical figure.
So what does misrepresentation do to agency? By attributing to Truth an inaccurate dialect, Truth's "most powerful arguments and apt metaphors were by this language deformed, even ridiculed" (13). The closest comparison I can think of would be Hamlet's "To Be or Not To Be" pronounced in a stereotypical Valley girl dialect - the words in the soliloquy would lose a great deal of its command of an audience.
Because her text is interpreting Truth's point of view, the onus is on Gage to properly deliver Truth's agency on her behalf. If Truth's agency is transferred from her to Gage, why then should we continue to admire Truth still today? If someone is not the author of words attributed to them, are they even worthy of attention? Perhaps agency gained more flexibility in 1863 than it had in the days of Aristotle.
Vanessa, if anything, I get the sense that Campbell uses the Gage-Truth example to demonstrate how difficult it is to pinpoint exactly *where* or *on whom* the agency rests. It certainly seems to be a co-construction involving Gage, Truth, Campbell, and us. Otherwise, agency might be little more than an object, entity, or materiality that gets shifted or transferred from one person to another, one person at a time.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, if it were the case that Truth had agency and then Gage took it, wouldn't that be reinforcing Foucault's suspicion that texts are imbued with power and only one author can hold power at a time?
In simpler terms, wouldn't that notion of agency reflect Foucault's concern that there can be only one agent at a time?
Somehow, I get the sense that Campbell is trying to complicate that idea for us, as part of her challenge to determine "whether the phoenix of female agency can emerge out of the ashes of the dead male author" (1).
I guess that raises a question for me: Is it possible to still see Gage's portrayal of Truth as harmful, in the sense that Campbell describes, without reinforcing Foucauldian notions of power, which necessarily rely on only one agent having power at a time?
-Prof. Graban