It don hav 2B so!

Response to excerpts from Sven Birkets’ The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)

I think it is funny that Birkets thinks we will need fifty years to transition into the new age of technology. It has been 19 years since he wrote his text, and we can already see the effects of modern communicative technology on our youth. As he stated, “the pace if rapid,” and technology has advanced at sky-rocket speed.
However, reading his article explained why I have adapted so well to the computer age (acknowledgment made that I was not raised in the pc generation). I feel that I think laterally (sometimes I think I am ADD). I am okay with following the “rabbit trails” (as I call them). I am okay with reading a forth of an article, following a hyperlink to its end, and then returning to that article, and then following another rabbit trail. I think this kind of information mapping can be helpful in making sense of language because I can learn what as aspects of a subject before I finish the article. In fact, I have added hyperlinks to my blog so that my readers can have an overview of S. Burroughs in order to understand my blog. AND I fully expect that they will leave my blog to investigate him, then I expect (or hope) they will return to my blog to finish reading my post. In a way, it is dialogism (polyphony and heterglossia) because there are competing individual voices all explaining the same issue. But, I also believe it is incumbent on me to make my argument interesting enough to hook them back after they have followed a hyperlink. I also love the tag-lines, the bullet points, the charts, the pictures, the hyperlinks, etc.

BUT I do believe Birkets has an argument about language erosion: “We can expect that curricula will be further streamlined, and difficult texts in the humanities will be pruned and glossed. . . Fewer and fewer people will be able to contend with the so-called masterworks of literature or ideas.” We live in a sitcom world where all our problems must be solved in one 30-minute episode. Not only have we shortened our attention span, but we’ve shortened our literature (into 2 hour movies for 600 page novels) and our language: Fab or fabulous, BFF (best friend forever), pc (politically correct). Yet this phenomenon is not new to English speakers. Take for instance, “don’t” (do not), ain’t (am not), and FYI (for your information). IM (instant message) speak seems to me to be the culmination of an every changing and reinventing societal language. Nevertheless, his argument about literature does make me sad, but I’m not sure it has to be that way. An older woman (about 60 years of age) once approached my daughter, who was reading Pride and Prejudice at that moment, and told her that she (the lady) should could not read that book because of archaic language. My daughter, at age 14, read the book with no trouble. By Birkets’ argument, these roles should have been reversed. It is through television that I was introduced to Jane Austen and fell in love with her works. I found the book and read it with a dictionary nearby--honest. And more to the point, my son, after watching The Lord of the Rings, read all Tolkien’s books, including the ever-difficult Silmarillion (which, I am given to understand, few teens can make it through). Therefore, I think Birkets’ dire predictions do not have to come to fruition. We can still embrace the technological revolution, yet bend it towards our own advantages and the advantages of our younger generation.

Fruits of Repentance and Sweets of Liberty; Polyphonic voices in the Memoirs of Steven Burroughs

I have taken to reading Bakhtin after reading Steven Burrough’s narrative, and therefore, when I ran across an interesting passage, I was stumped about whether it was technically a polyphonic voice. The text appears page 171, and immediately I noticed something unique about Burrough’s voice. In this passage he reports the story about the dollar and the rum for the men while at Castle Island (pictured at right). [I found his determination to divide the rum equally as well as some other things he said as pre-Marxists, but that is another post.] Mount “told [Cushing], that Burroughs had kept the money himself, and the other prisoners had received nothing.” These were paraphrased words by Burroughs, but Burroughs does not refer to himself as “me," but as “himself,” as Mount would have done. Also, the story contradicts SB’s, but I found it odd that SB resisted the urge to say “Mount lied and told him that . . .” But Burroughs simply states his story then Mont’s (even though it is paraphrased) without prejudice. Burroughs continues to state that Cushing tells an alternate story to Mr. May, he,

related, that he had given three dollars to Burroughs, for the prisoners, and that Burroughs, had appropriated them to his own use, refusing to participate with any others in the benefit of the money. Mr. May entered with warmth into the subject, and when he saw me, expostulated upon the impropriety of my conduct. . . . (171)

 In this section, Burroughs again retells the story, keeping polyphonic voices by referring to his self as “Burroughs,” as Cushing would have done, rather than “me.” Also, Mr. May’s voice comes through in the phrase “impropriety of my conduct.” Even though in this instance he does use the pronoun “me,” we can hear May’s voice in choice words such as “impropriety” and “conduct.”


According to Vice, the polyphonic novel is one that is “multi-accented and contradictory in its values” (Vice 123). Furthermore, she notes that “a possible image of polyphony would be a church, ‘a communion of unmerged souls, where sinners and righteous men come together" (Bakhtin, PDP 26; Vice 123).  This image really helped me to understand polyphony.  These polyphonic voices are contradictory in their values, and SB’s narrative seems to allow freedom of other’s contradictory voices into his narrative. Other instances also include the Turk and the Venetian slave story (163), the voices he relates of others through the quoted text, and the various inserted letters (I could argue the veracity of his wife’s).

At this point, I have to note Burroughs’ manipulation of text by his selection of inserting letters into his text out of chronological order, which I thought odd.

Pg 172: letter from Ebenezer Davis (brother-in-law) to SB (April 20th, 1788)

Pg 173: letter from Jonathan Davis to SB (May 12th, 1788)

Pg 173: letter from parents to SB (October 16th, 1787)

Pg 175: letter from SB to parents (November 27th, 1787)

By placing the uncles’ letters before the parents, Burroughs makes it appear that the uncles enduced the parents to write and that the uncles care more about his wellbeing than his own parents, thus eliciting sympathy. Also, the letter from his parents chastises him for his conduct as well as his attempt to gain freedom, while the uncle’s are more positive; Davis even reports about hearing of his good conduct. Davis uses the term “the sweets of liberty,” which appears in stark contrast to the parent’s “fruits of repentance” (173-174). I believe that by placing the parents last, SB causes us to remember their lack of faith in their son and therefore we pity him all the more.

While SB manipulates these polyphonic voices to his own gain, his voice is likewise manipulated by editors post 1811. While one might think that Burroughs is the author of his own text, the appearance in 1811 of edited footnotes disrupts the notion of author. Thereafter, Burroughs’ voice appears, it seems, at the will of the editor. His voice is frequently questioned by the editor and author of the footnotes, and his voice is shortened by a later abridged version of the narrative. These subsequent editors appear to have usurped Burroughs’ voice and manipulated his identity in order to present his story the way they felt it should be presented. In short, the editor becomes the author and Burroughs becomes one of the many narrators (who is subjected to the narrator of the footnotes).

Other than my notes about voice and authorship, I enjoyed reading Burroughs’ story; I can understand why it would be entertaining--there is something Huck Finn'ish in this telling.  Moreover, he had a flair for leadership; look at how he rallied prisoners to revolt. He was quite clever in arguing and presenting his case, particularly his distinction of molestation in “open” spaces, which he argues were “private.” It is obvious from his narrative that he is an articulate man and one cannot help wondering how far he would have gone if he had stayed in school and not got into trouble. Perhaps that is the lesson children are to read into the text, but, to me, it is heavily veiled in “three-stooges” like comedy and Socratic rhetorical tragedy. Tragedy and Comedy, a carnivalesque notion indeed!

Works Cited
Burroughs, Stephen. Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798). Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988.

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.

“Sophisticated Wickedness” and Multi-Voiced Dialogism

In revisiting Bakhtin’s theories of Dialogism, I am at once struck with the variety of ways in which Stephen Burroughs memoirs are dialogic—and not only double-voiced, but multi-voiced. To begin, I noticed that I hear a variety of Burroughs’es in the text—there is the young lad scamping around and getting into “innocent” mischief; the slightly older teenage Burroughs, sounding cocky in his cleverness (the shoe sermon); the whiny Burroughs constantly blaming others for his crimes; the scared Burroughs pleading his case with high pathos (the starvation) (see dramatic monologue on page 107 “O! ruthless mortals! said I, . . . Am not I a member of the same family with yourselves!”); and the outraged democratic Burroughs expostulating on the inconsistencies of America’s belief in Liberty. Finally, all of Burroughs’s voices are told in hindsight through the narrator, the older, hopefully more wise, Burroughs. He is, indeed, creating “meaning out of past utterance[s]” and enabling the “constant need for utterances to position themselves in relation to one another” (Vice 45), by positing the past utterance of the young Burroughs within dialogue with the older Burroughs.

Furthermore, Burroughs’s narrative considers the voice of the reader as an interlocutor, making assumptions about his/her opinions, thoughts, curiosities, etc., in his narrative. In addition to the dramatic monologue mentioned above, see also page 67, Burroughs writes, “I know the world will blame me, but I wish to justify my conduct to myself let the world think what it may.” While this message appears to be monologic, he is in fact “mixing intentions of speaker and listener” (Vice 45) and incorporating in the narrative voice of the social and historical listener. He, in essence, considered what we the readers would likely think or say and anticipating our voice in his statement. In a similar vein, he searches out voices in rhetorical questions like those on page 86, “What could be done? What more could be said? . . . What would you have done, had you been in my situation?” I think Vice would say these questions fit Bakhtin’s monologism as they expect no answer (See Vice page 52) (I’m really confused by her example), but I don’t agree. Burroughs knows there will be an answer and tries to anticipate it by answering it before it is asked. Anticipating the answer inherently acknowledges another’s voice. In this instance, he tells us he has no choice but to do the evil errand for Lysander that ultimately gets Burroughs incarcerated and tortured.

Burroughs (or rather the author; I guess I should distinguish) continues to incorporate dialogism in his narrative by including excerpts or summaries from contemporary newspapers (see, for instance, page 91 about the printer from Springfield) so that he may refute them, inserts letters from various Reverends and family members so that he may interpret them and place them in context with his own narrative, and uses their dialogue in such a way as to sway his reader towards his cause—thereby giving their voice double-voicedness. These examples exemplify the ways in which Dialogized heteroglossia “refers to the combative relations different languages enter into when they come into contact, most clearly perceptible in a text” (my emphasis, Vice 49).


Moreover, there is the recipient “Sir” (the “Friend” the story is addressed to) not only implies the individual “Sir” and takes into account his voice, but it also is double-voiced because Burroughs knew others would come to read the letters as well (as argued above). Taking into account the opinion of a wider audience, I read a comic turn on page 110 when Burroughs abruptly ends his tale just when the story is getting interesting—he gives a pathos-educed build-up just to tell us that he is tired and will finish his story later—a technique we later came to call “the cliff hanger.”

Finally, I cannot forget the editor, who in turns both supported Burroughs claims (see footnote page 43) and contradicted him (see footnotes page 26 and 28, where the editor defends Professor Ripley). The pro / con stances evidenced by the editor epitomize the dialogic nature of the narrative and also make me wonder about the printer, the book store owner, the advertisement writers, and all other “voices” that, I feel, go into making up the “author,” including the sketch artist of Burroughs.

As I've been asking my students all week, "So What?"  So what if Burroughs' narrative is dialogic (multi-voiced)? What is the significance of that?  I believe the "So What?" lies in the fact that because Stephen Burroughs' wrote his narrative, he has gained immortality through the written word and has become public property.  As public property, he does not live (in print) in a vacuum.  We all re-write Burroughs' life when we read him and interpret him--we all participate in the dialogic process in defining Burroughs, and therefore, Burroughs can never be finalized (I am on shaky ground with Bakhtin's unfinalizablity theories).

Thus far I have very much enjoyed reading Burroughs—and I most distinctly see both serious (political) and comic double-voicedness in the text. I also have noted many instances of “the spectacle” and “the carnivalesque,” but I’ll save those ideas for another chapter of Vice.


Works Cited

Burroughs, Stephen. Memoirs of Stephen Burroughs (1798). Boston: Northeastern UP, 1988. (*"Sophisticated Wickedness" refers to the description Robert Frost used in the forward to describe Burroughs.)

Vice, Sue. Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1997.