The First Person Singular

23. The Representative Voice

112 23 The Representative Voice Every established discourse of the sciences and technologies enlists individuals who in impassioned experience have recognized the sublimity of the astronomic, biological, or microscopic realm their science is exploring and mapping; the significance of agricultural research or pharmaceutical manufacture; the importance of institutions of justice and for care for the handicapped and infirm. In speaking and answering, they speak with the words of the established discourse; they stand in those words and find their own voice. They put their bodies and their lives in their responses. To be there, in the building, as electricians is to commit themselves to repair any blown circuit at any hour and wherever it is, even at risk to their bodies. There are risks to which an ophthalmologist, a ferryboat captain, and a public health nurse expose their clients, but they expose themselves to risks that may well be greater. The importance of a group and its habitat, work, visions, and follies is also recognized in the talk of individuals. The ethnographer Kathleen Stewart listened, in what for her were impassioned experiences, to the talk of West Virginia unemployed people in abandoned coal-mining regions . She heard their individual voices and writes to convey them in their rhythms, accents, and silences.1 The talk of the people she recorded is “just talk”; it is not the canonical discourse of rational and technical knowledge, and it does not supply general paradigms of explanation. It recounts unforeseen events and accidents, effects disproportionate to their causes; it dramatizes singular events and invokes like events from an unforgettable or fabled past. What is “just talk” rummages in the space outside of completed thoughts and does not simply exemplify or fill out thoughts we have. Connections between things are always partial; there is always something more to say, always room for new questions, and associations form that are themselves unforeseen events. “Just talk,” because it dramatizes unpredictable events and accidents and the eccentricity of behavior they and the stories told about them provoke, is amusement, and in the shared laughter and tears a community is formed and prized. Stewart records not only the story but also the score of the story— reproducing as well as she can on her pages the rhythm, the periodicity, the pitch, and the accents of the voice. Are not the tropes of the stories 113 M Y O W N V O I C E told and the phantasms they quicken born from this musicality of the voice? The timbre, resonance, and rhythms of each voice make the plot of the stories told and retold each time different. In the way an individual tells the story of the drought and famine that ravaged the community, he makes the story of his own hunger and desperation his commitment to his community and to his word. ...