Any study of autobiographical narratives that appeared under the ostensible authorship of African American writers between 1760 and 1865 inevitably raises concerns about authenticity and interpretation. Should an autobiography whose written composition was literally out of the hands of its narrator be considered as the literary equivalent of those autobiographies that were authored independently by their subjects?
In many cases, the so-called edited narrative of an ex-slave ought to be treated as a ghostwritten account insofar as literary analysis is concerned, especially when it was composed by its editor from “a statement of facts” provided by an African American subject. Blassingame has taken pains to show that the editors of several of the more famous antebellum slave narratives were “noted for their integrity” and thus were unlikely to distort the facts given them by slave narrators. From a literary standpoint, however, it is not the moral integrity of these editors that is at issue (at issue 1: in a state of controversy: in disa美国GREement 2 also in issue: under discussion or in dispute) but the linguistic, structural, and tonal integrity of the narratives they produces. Even if an editor faithfully reproduced the facts of a narrator’s life, it was still the editor who decided what to make of these facts, how they should be emphasized, in what order they ought to be presented, and what was extraneous or germane. Readers of African American autobiography then and now have too readily accepted the presumption of these eighteenth- and nineteenth-century editors that experiential facts recounted orally could be recorded and sorted by an amanuensis-editor, taken out of their original contexts, and then published with editorial prefaces, footnotes, and appended commentary, all without compromising the validity of the narrative as a product of an African American consciousness.
Transcribed narratives in which an editor explicitly delimits his or her role undoubtedly may be regarded as more authentic and reflective of the narrator’s thought in action (in action: adv.在活动, 在运转) than those edited works that flesh (to clothe or cover with or as if with flesh; broadly: to give substance to usually used with out) out a statement of facts in ways unaccounted for. Still, it would be naïve to accord dictated oral narratives the same status as autobiographies composed and written by the subjects of the stories themselves. This point is illustrated by an analysis of Works Pro美国GREss Administration interviews with ex-slaves in the 1930s that suggests that narrators often told interviewers what they seemed to want to hear. If it seemed impolitic for former slaves to tell all they knew and thought about the past to interviewers in the 1930s, the same could be said of escaped slaves on the run in the antebellum era. Dictated narratives, therefore, are literary texts whose authenticity is difficult to determine. Analysts should reserve close analytic readings for independently authored texts. Discussion of collaborative texts should take into account the conditions that governed their production.英语作文
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