Unnatural Binaries and Writing through Speech

             I am surprised that no one has had an issue with Emig treating writing as a “learned behavior” as opposed to “talking [as a] natural, even irrepressible, behavior.” (or perhaps people have had an issue with that, but are much more subtle/nuanced than I am). It took me a while to get past that sentence since I think it’s so full of incorrect notions and ridiculous politics. I’ve had many contentious conversations with my more linguistically bent friends about the treatment of writing as an invention and conversation as always already existent. By placing writing and talking into an unnatural binary, I think she is inherently placing more value in talking than in writing—though she does value writing. While writing is a “stark, barren, even naked as a medium; talking is rich, luxuriant, inherently redundant”. Again I disagree with that assessment since Information Theorists would argue that writing can be just as redundant as speaking. And while I found the rest of the article interesting, I can’t fully endorse everything she writes here.

            But, I don’t want to be a complete Negative Nelly, so I’ll finish my post with something a little more positive, if slightly off topic. Toward the end of the essay when she is writing about Sartre and the importance of self-rhythm, I thought about the famous writers who have created some great works through an amanuensis. Henry James and John Milton were two writers who dictated their work to others, yet whose “writing” is still rich and thought-provoking. Richard Powers, an all-around amazing writing (read him!), uses speech-recognition software to capture everything that he “writes”. When I first encountered Powers, I didn’t know that fact and it stunned me when I found out. Of course, after writing, he does go through and edits his work, but he still approaches writing through speech. I wonder what Emig would have to say about these writers who engage in writing through speech.