Weekly Journal Entry: 9/14/09

            Stephen Burroughs reminds me of Prince Hal from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. Burroughs revels in his ability to play the trickster, but he recognizes the foolishness of his youth and, at least in the first third of the narrative, seems to intimate a desire to shine once he is done walking through the muck of adolescent frivolity. However, unlike Prince Hal, Burroughs is not able to undergo a transformation. Instead, he merely retains his ability to play a role; indeed, his language is highly theatrical all throughout his story and he frequently regards his adventures as dramas to be exhibited to the public. For example, when he goes to Dartmouth, he notes that the new atmosphere calls for “another part to act” (23). Soon after, Burroughs makes his way to the coast in order to obtain employment at sea. He reflects on how his father “let me loose upon the broad theater of the world, to act my part according to my abilities” (30). Fortunately for Burroughs, his abilities at acting are adaptive and convincing. When he becomes a preacher at Pelham, Burroughs boasts that he was able to “adapt my conduct to their genius as far as I was capable” (53). Within a few days, Burroughs recognizes the character of the community and adopts a complimentary persona in order to achieve his desires through the mechanism of spectacle.

            The talent for performance is requisite for any con man, but Burroughs is unique in that he has the capability to both act and subsequently ruminate on his choices in a philosophic and moralistic manner. True, his ethics are entirely defunct, but to follow his reasoning and learn of his justifications presents the reader with the impression that Burroughs was a contradictory man—fully aware of the consequences, but attempting to use his intellect in order to vindicate his crimes. After deciding to retrieve supplies for counterfeiting in Springfield, Burroughs claims, “my motive for this undertaking is founded on the principles of uprightness. I think the sentiment of friendship is the uppermost object in this undertaking” (87). Of course, only a few pages before Burroughs describes with poignancy the acute disappointment he felt in being duped by Phillips. Burroughs continually undermines his declarations of altruism by including in his narrative intricate contemplations of his desire for wealth and a life of ease.

            In order to obtain this desired affluence, the counterfeiter must be prepared to maintain a life of contradictory words and actions. However, early in his “letter,” Burroughs exhorts his addressee to be wary of a child’s gaze, for a child can quickly learn of its parents “whether our words and our actions speak the same language” (6). As a counterfeiter, Burroughs can never achieve this harmony of speech and deed. Instead, language is a tool for Burroughs—his words cannot adequately express who he is or what he really does. In light of this contradiction, Burroughs chooses acts of deception involving oration; his stint as a preacher exemplifies his aptitude for supplementing appearances with eloquent rhetoric. When he first arrives in the small community of Ludlow, Burroughs is wearing clothes that do not look like a clergyman’s garb. Though he is not successful with the people of Ludlow, when he arrives in Pelham he soon is able to surmount this difficulty by using language as a means for obtaining the Pelhamites’ trust. Just as Dr. Hamilton used scientific language to fool people into believing that he was a true doctor, Burroughs employs words, both to the people of Pelham and in his narrative as a whole, to veil his actual criminal mindset.

            Armed with more understanding of heteroglossia, I found that I could actually somewhat grasp Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism. In criminal narratives, dialogism is bound to appear in almost every utterance. If words and actions never speak the same language, then dialogism accentuates this tension between the two. Burroughs continually speaks with “double-voicedness,” especially when he begins to describe his first arrest for counterfeiting. He recalls that “a part of the beforementioned clerks came into the office, hauling after them a man like the Trojans, when they had found the Greek Sinon vociferating, ‘Here is a man who knows him! Here is a man who knows him!’” (88-89). This phrase contains many associations with past utterances and literary forms—poetry, historical accounts, later dramatic reproductions, considerations of the Trojan war in philosophic and religious works, and even the young American republic itself. As Bakhtin himself says in Discourse in the Novel, “The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships […] and all this may crucially shape discourse” (276). In Burroughs’s phrase, the dialogical words and expressions serve several purposes at once; they connect Burroughs’s sense of injustice with past traitors like Sinon, they exemplify Burroughs’s supposed knowledge of ancient literature (and thus intimate that he is too civilized and intellectual to deserve mistreatment), and they remind the reader that problems of justice go back thousands of years.

            I look forward to further discussing dialogism in class because I think that solidifying my understanding of this concept will aid my comprehension of how texts, phrases, and individual words interact to create layers of meaning. I am also interested in discovering how everyone else interprets Burroughs; so far, to me, he appears complex and almost mysterious. Of course, how much of this narrative is actually Burroughs himself is up for questioning. Another question I would like to raise, connected with this idea, is: Given the nature of dialogism and the problem of authorship and veracity, can we ever read a narrative that allows words and actions to speak the same language?