‘In other people’s mouths’
97
Since no utterance is ever exclusive—the final word, as it were—all
discourse finds itself within this interplay of concealing and revealing, and all
discourse revolves around the shared and counter utterances of the Other.
Moody’s act of restoration (if that is what it is), then, simply signals to the
reader—the other partner in this discourse—that not all has been said or can be
said. Moody (in the construction and reconstruction of the events, the ideas, and
indeed, of this text) demonstrates that not only is language, as Bakhtin reminds
us, “overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already
enveloped in an obscuring mist,” but so, too, is one’s life. “I had learned that my
past didn’t exist except in interpretations of the past,” Moody tells us (202). That
said, Moody’s “memoir” set out to trace the authenticity of Hawthorne’s
“footnote,” while it worked to make sense of (and in some ways make “real”)
Moody’s own life.
Oregon State University
William Petty
Notes
Endnotes serve to add information to the discussion-at-hand without distracting from the
on-going conversation; that is, endnotes are asides, references, perhaps even anecdotes that
are as necessary to the conversation as is the overall text. And yet, endnotes are set a part
from the main train of thought by a reference number. In a way, endnotes are also dialogic
in that they disrupt and interrupt the conversation in order to have their say. They situate
themselves as the other voices—they bring to the conversation their own set of utterances
and assumptions. In a sense they exist “in other people’s mouths, in other people’s
contexts, serving other people’s intentions” (Bakhtin).
1. We shape the narrative according to the conventions of the form. For example, one’s
grocery list—“bread, butter, milk, and eggs”—is read one way as a grocery list and then
another way if we assume it’s meant to be a poem. Mary Klages argues that for Bakhtin, a
grocery list may be more reflective of social relationships; the list appears to have a
distinctive social purpose, while, if read as a poem, the words “presume alien WGFW&