‘In other people’s mouths’
93
and accents [of] previous users, and any utterance we make is directed towards
some real or hypothetical Other” (Lodge 21).
Moody’s autobiography is always in contention with what is known,
imagined, understood or claimed in the process of creating a “life story.” It is
dialogic in its assumptions: not only does the memoir anticipate the “future
answer word,” it also recognizes the relationship between its own discourse and
“other discourses outside the text, which are imitated or evoked or alluded to by
means of doubly-oriented speech” (Lodge 22). Moody’s utterances, then, show
they are directed toward that Other and that these utterances are themselves the
product of other utterances. Kent tells us that “Bakhtin’s conception of the
utterance accounts for the dialogic and collaborative nature of language-in-use by
merging the speaker/text with the other” (286). Adding,
Within any communicative interaction . . . the speaker shapes
her discourse in response to the other, and in a similar fashion,
the listener makes sense of another’s discourse by taking a
responsive and interactive stance toward the speaker/text.
Bakhtin argues that no meaningful communication can occur
without a response from the other: ‘Any understanding is
imbued with response and necessarily elicits it in one form or
another: the listener becomes the speaker’8 (286-87).
All understanding, then, takes place as a response to the Other. But
response is never one sided: just as the listener becomes the speaker, the speaker
becomes the listener, and so on and so on. By this standard alone, Moody’s
autobiography positions itself as an example of the dialogic, of “language-in-use.”
If understanding the self, as James Olney contends, is the raison d’etre of
autobiography, or memoir, merging the speaker with the Other can only bring
about such understanding.9 In this sense, Moody’s text oozes with heteroglossia
facilitating exchanges between, well, between his voice and his father’s voice, his
voice and his mostly silent mother’s voice (but can it not be understood that
silence is just as loud as the loudest voice?), his voice and his sister’s, Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s, his friends, his enemies, not to mention the voices of historical and
cultural icons (some speaking for themselves, some being spoken for10), as well as
his past, his present, his future voice. There is fullness and richness to all those
other voices: the many and varied voices that speak to, with, at, against, and for
Rick Moody. And if you are familiar with Moody’s fiction, there are those voices
which he himself has ventriloquized in early novels and short stories: voices
whose utterances find purchase along the margins of this memoir.11
Moody’s opening paragraph is an act of containment; his opening
sentence sets the stage for us to engage in conversation with him, to agree or
disagree, to contradict or affirm his words. “So there’s the matter of our crimes,”