We’ve talked in class about the difficulty of depicting abstract ideas in audio. The story told in “The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto” by David Antin is definitely not abstract. It’s a mundane story about the search for the “perfect” mattress. The story turns out to be an allegory for decision making in the postmodern era: “this is the situation that I think best describes our postmodern condition    with respect to which I believe in taking descartes advice    if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way to go     go for it straight ahead     because its not likely to be worse than any anything else” (122). Antin’s essay, as John D’Agata’s introduction to the essay states, is crafted from Antin’s spoken word performance (111). This is evident not only in Antin’s uncomplicated colloquial language, but also in the mundanity of the story and the (to my mind) maddeningly reductive ending.

By reductive, I mean Antin reduces this mattress to a simple moral that sounds like something my grandfather would pose as a solution to a problem he refused to listen to. It also reminds me of the saying, “he who hesitates is lost,” which is not true in all situations and doesn’t mean anything without any context.

However, I’m afraid that an ending like this one is hard to avoid in an audio essay. When its difficult to convey something non-concrete, reductive endings are a possible result. It’s a way for the audio essay to “‘Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard phrase, round and solid as a ball, which [listeners] can see and handle and carry home with them’” (Emerson qtd. in Orleans 176).

I’m a little worried about the ending to my audio essay in light of this observation. Thus far, my essay could easily end with a reductive “talk is cheap,” or “silence is golden”. And while that’s hyperbole, the meaning is similar. But, I think I am forgetting the voice. The expressive voice adds a new dimension to the essay that makes it less reductive. Voices contain the diction, tone, and accent of the people speaking. Depth in the audio essay doesn’t lie in verbiage, it lies in the individual(s) who lend(s) the essay voice. Even with a reductive ending, the voice that says it is, in a way, abstract and difficult to define—because it is as unique as any complex sentence construction.

So, I guess, after consideration of the three voices in my audio essay, I’m less worried.