What the Migrants Said

After talking about it in class on Thursday, I thought a lot about the voices that these authors use when they are writing about people who live completely lives than they do. Sometimes they use the voice of the poor migrants and sometimes they use the highly stylized voice of the writers that they are. The question is which voice is more appropriate? Do these privileged people who are given cars and money to go around the country talking to the poor and the desperate really have the right to use their voice? Like we’ve said a number of times, sometimes the people who are writing the books or articles or making the movies don’t really know anything about the lives of the migrant people. They might drive around talking to gas station owners and taking pictures of hitchhikers, but they sleep in hotels at night and eat breakfast every day and have control over their situations and circumstances. Why should Steinbeck, whose parents took care of him well into adulthood, be allowed to use the accents and the phrases and voices of people he studied but really could never fully understand?

But then the reading this week made me think about the other option—does it really make sense for the writers to bestow this grand, scholarly, poetic language on these people? The descriptive, poet sections in The Grapes of Wrath were one thing, because Steinbeck was using the novel form to bring attention to the plight of the migrants going to California. He used his poetic voice to describe the land, or an event, or a group of people—in those chapters, he was not necessarily speaking for a specific person or even a type of person, but rather an idea about the lives of many, many people. But I felt like some of the pieces from this week were completely different—the first section of the Agee and Evans reading caught me completely off guard. The voice was so stylized and so grand that I felt like it just didn’t fit with the subject of Great Depression. And then the prose that came next was hardly any better. I just felt like the style that the words were written in removed the whole piece from the story it was trying to tell. It was the most distant I ever felt from the Great Depression in any of the readings we’ve done so far. Even knowing that the writers who used the voice of the poor people were hardly poor themselves, they still felt more authentic, more connected to the stories they were telling, even if they weren’t.

I think the most interesting use of voice was in American Exodus, because it was this mix of academic and artistic and sociological, but they also incorporated the actual voices along with the actual images of their subjects. It’s important to hear the voices of the people of this time period, and by including direct quotations from the people in the pictures they took, no one was speaking for anyone but themselves. I think the most interesting part of this piece was when the quotations from the farmers were right next to quotations from sociologists and government officials.