The Program Era by Mark McGurl

Author:Mark McGurl [McGurl, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2009-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Finding the voice of the Asian-American writer, 1974. jacket design by Bob Onodera, photograph by Ken Gaetjen, reproduced by permission of Howard University Press.

This model of storytelling is what has been termed an “autoethnographic” one, in which the autopoetic reflexivity of modernist and postmodernist narrative in general, as discussed in the Introduction to this book, is inflected by an anthropological understanding of cultural collectivity. Occasioning the act of self-expression, the cultural formation I have been calling “high cultural pluralism” reflected nonetheless Franz Boas’s assertion that “the group, not the individual, is always the primary concern of the anthropologist,” an idea amplified in McLuhan’s account of the obsolescence of individualism in the interconnected global village.18 Our task will be to trace the autoethnographic project of “finding” or “claiming” one’s voice as a storyteller back to its origins in the system of higher education. Not that the period’s fascination with the visceral power of the human voice was in itself new. Voice is arguably—and, more important to me, was in the sixties frequently argued to be—essential to all literature, wittingly or not, and various overt forms of what Gates calls the “speakerly text” have been around for centuries.19 My focus here is on the way that long history intersected with the “machinery”—both social institutional and overtly technological—that produced the increasingly paramount value of “cultural difference” in postwar American fiction.

The implications of performing such a contextualization are expressed with admirable economy in John Barth’s short story “Autobiography,” from the collection Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice (1968). In this story it soon becomes clear that the first person narrator of the story is the story “Autobiography” itself, as though an instance of this narrative form could be freed from its supplementary relation to a human life and personified as an autonomously self-expressive being. Barth’s ambiguously serious indication, in the preface to this collection, that the story would ideally be heard emanating from a tape recorder while the author (presumably Barth himself) stands silently by, adds another layer of significance to the story. This one allows us to see how narrative forms—in this case the genre of autobiography and its associated conventions—can themselves be understood as recording technologies of a kind. And while we should not be induced to believe that either a narrative form or a recording apparatus could actually speak for itself like a person—that would be taking a science fiction trope too literally—we can at least see, thanks to the ironically “silent” Barth, how persons necessarily give voice to forms even when they speak for themselves.

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