Читать книгу Benjamin Drew. The Refugee. Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada онлайн

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Consequently, slave narratives, aided by the editing activity of abolitionists and their idiosyncratic viewpoint, told slaves’ stories by erasing the most ideologically problematic issues in such a way that the readers did not turn away but rather decided to step into the story to “hear” what the author was saying. This literary and ideological move served a twofold purpose: to facilitate the passing on of their stories and to visualize the abolitionist propaganda attached to them. As a (Canadian) slave narrative, Drew’s book is no exception to this exercise and exemplifies this literary ventriloquism. Being a mediated text in which the slaves were previously interviewed to, later on, find their stories published, the writing of the book has raised some objections. The fugitives’ voice is heard through Drew’s interviews although the voice of the abolitionist is omitted in the text so that the only message conveyed is that of the ex-slave. Although this literary exercise has been used to question the validity of Drew’s book, the little biographies he offered acquire a worthy literary dimension if read using Foucault’s critique to the Barthesian scriptor. Rather than considering that caught under the weight of his immense vocabulary, the scriptor, without words he can call his own, may well be unable to be held accountable for the meaning he inscribes, Foucault vindicates the notion of writing as “transpos[ing] the empirical characteristics of the author” (104), who works ideologically even if traces of the author himself are absent. To put it in another way, Foucault thereby moves from the Barthean scriptor as that which conditions readings to the author as a production of the reader and evinces that, even if the author functions to limit the text, it is nevertheless the reader who actively creates that limit and fills its whole meaning. In this manner, the author cannot bear the responsibility for the present and/or absent meaning a writing can convey. This is precisely what Drew’s text upholds.