Ivan Kreilkamp
VOICE AND THE VICTORIAN STORYTELLER
264pp. Cambridge University Press. $85.
0 521 85193 9
Ivan Kreilkamp’s subject is both the literary representation of voice and, specifically, the relation between oral and written modes of storytelling. “Contemporary literary criticism” (according to Kreilkamp) “takes it for granted that members of pre-novelistic cultures relied on modes of oral communication exemplified by communal storytelling, and that the advent of print displaced the spoken word as the glue holding modern societies together – thereby driving speech into obsolescence”. He has Walter Benjamin’s “melancholic” essay “The Storyteller” (1936) in his sights; as against this “classic articulation of the longing generated by the supposed displacement of voice”, he says, “I want to insist that voice is heterogeneous and thriving within modern print culture”.
The Victorian novel may have colluded in the defeat of speech by writing, but it also invested “extraordinary value in an idealized version of the speech community it had relegated to the past . . . . an imaginary storyteller acquires symbolic power within Victorian fiction as that which redeems fiction from the guilt of participating in a bureaucratic modernity”.
Voice and the Victorian Storyteller sets out to record the traces of a struggle within Victorian fiction between the impulse to value “voice” and the impulse to suppress or control it. This struggle has a political dimension which is explicated in a chapter on “industrial fiction” (Disraeli and Gaskell); a gender plot (a chapter on Charlotte Brontë and the trope of “withheld speech”); a bearing on genre (Robert Browning’s revision of dramatic monologue in his “novel poem” The Ring and the Book); and a proto-Modernist aspect (the concluding chapter links the representation of ghostly or absent voices in Heart of Darkness with the recent invention of the phonograph). Two central chapters on Dickens consider, first, his attitude to an earlier form of “phonography”, namely shorthand and “the reform of writing”, and second, his ambivalent pursuit of authorial power in his public readings. Kreilkamp sees these chapters as “case-studies aiming to delineate, illuminate, and analyse a broad and often unacknowledged cultural discourse concerning the relationship between Victorian print, writing, voice, and orality”. The term “unacknowledged” points to a secondary aim: Kreilkamp wants to challenge the Benjaminesque nostalgia of his fellow critics for a vanished “orality”, which, he claims, is actually the invention of print culture itself. “One might think”, he says, “that Derrida’s powerful critique of phonocentrism in Western culture would have put an end once and for all to the habit of idealizing voice as a cure for print or writing – yet voice retains the power of a fetish.” The narrowness of Kreilkamp’s intellectual horizon is apparent here, but the point is a serious one. If critics who believe in the figure of a charismatic storyteller are being seduced by a myth, then these victims of false consciousness need to be woken from their trance. Politely, of course. “I certainly do not wish to critique lightly the important work that was initiated within a project of what we could call novel criticism as vocal recovery”, Kreilkamp assures us:
“But I believe it is now time to rethink and, perhaps, abandon the metaphor of literary writing as a suppressed or silenced voice. To do so might, among other things, lead us to a more forthright understanding of our own role as knowledge producers and writers within a modern information culture.”
The sense of Kreilkamp’s own earnest, humourless voice is strong here; it conjures up a conference or symposium, it reads like the peroration of a keynote address. But on the evidence of this book Kreilkamp has some way to go before he can speak with authority about the production of knowledge.
He begins by co-opting his readers into a community of error. “Most of us assume that orality is an attenuated relic of an era before the rise of modern print culture.” But most of us (clutching our I-Pods and forgetting to switch off our mobile phones as we enter the lecture theatre) assume nothing of the sort. To begin with, “orality” is not the antithetical term to “print culture” but to writing. The relations between speech and text pre-date “print culture” by many centuries, and governed the composition and transmission of sacred books from the Bible to Homer. Not once in Kreilkamp’s book does the voice of Jesus, or for that matter of the Old Testament God who “utters” the world into being, figure in the intellectual history he is tracing, yet the prestige of “voice” cannot be understood without reference to Genesis, or the Sermon on the Mount – especially for Victorian authors and their readers, still steeped in a biblical tradition which emphasized the authenticity of the “word of God”, yet was increasingly troubled by challenges to that tradition. But then, Kreilkamp doesn’t deal with sermons of any kind, though each of his authors (apart, perhaps, from Conrad) must have attended hundreds of occasions on which a vocal performance was founded on a “text”; and Kreilkamp is in general either ignorant of, or indifferent to, Victorian religious “discourse”. There is a striking example in his discussion of the famous episode of extrasensory perception in Jane Eyre, in which Rochester tells Jane that he cried out to her and heard her reply, and Jane realizes that the words he “heard” were those she had actually spoken (“I am coming: wait for me!”):
“I listened to Mr Rochester’s narrative; but made no disclosure in return. The coincidence struck me as too awful and inexplicable to be communicated or discussed. If I told anything, my tale would be such as must necessarily make a profound impression on the mind of my hearer; and that mind, yet from its sufferings too prone to gloom, needed not the deeper shade of the supernatural. I kept these things, then, and pondered them in my heart.”
In citing this passage Kreilkamp omits the third sentence (“If I told anything . . .”) which rationally accounts for Jane’s silence, since he wants this “withholding of speech” to fit into a pattern by which Jane (and Charlotte Brontë herself) “shifts from a vocal to a scriptive mode of communication”. But it is even more significant that he makes no mention of the biblical text which Jane quotes:
“And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.”
In one sense, this passage (Luke 2: 16–20) fits Kreilkamp’s argument nicely, since Mary’s silent and solitary “pondering” is set against a rich framework of oral narrative, proclamation and communal “wonder”; but Mary cannot be deemed to be resorting to a “scriptive mode of communication”, especially given the Magnificat, which she speaks in the preceding chapter (Luke, of all the Gospel writers, gives Mary the most empowered and affirmative “voice”). What Jane Eyre means (or what Charlotte Brontë means her to mean) by invoking this analogy with the Virgin is a matter of dispute. That it bears on Kreilkamp’s argument is not.
There is, in any case, something troubling about the notion that Victorian fiction needed to recuperate “voice” as a guilt offering for its collusion in “a print culture that the novel itself represents as mindless, bureaucratic, and given to repetition”. Kreilkamp cites “the Gradgrind schoolroom” in Dickens’s Hard Times as the exemplary instance here, yet one might equally cite the passage from Chapter Sixteen of Bleak House in which Dickens wonders with compassion, but also a kind of horror, at Jo’s illiteracy:
“It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language – to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!”
That Dickens uses a vocal term (“dumb”) as well as a visual one shows how intimately he felt the connection between writing and speech as partners in a social identity which is productive and humane, as much as (or more than) it is “mindless” and “bureaucratic”.
An important part of Kreilkamp’s argument rests on the proposition that what happened in fiction from, roughly, the 1840s onwards represents a new phase in the relations between text and speech. But in order to make this case, he has to disregard the literary history of the previous century, or view it from an absurdly reductive standpoint. In Oliver Twist, we are told, Dickens “invested his own work with a new kind of excitement and public resonance by appropriating the entertainment of the street spectacle for his own writing”– as though Moll Flanders had never been written. “If the speakers of Johnson’s reporting or Austen’s fiction tend to utter consistently perfect prose, such a character as Dickens’s Jingle or Sam Weller opens up the novel to a new kind of writing that offers the effect of a transcription of voice in all its impropriety, ungrammaticality, and energy.”
Jane Austen’s speakers, however, include the hoydenish Lydia Bennet, the rambling Miss Bates, and, above all, Mrs Elton picking strawberries at Donwell Abbey:
“The best fruit in England – every body’s favourite – always wholesome. – These the finest beds and finest sorts. – Delightful to gather for one’s self – the only way of really enjoying them. – Morning decidedly the best time – never tired – every sort good – hautboy infinitely superior – no comparison – the others hardly eatable – hautboys very scarce – Chili preferred – white wood finest flavour of all – price of strawberries in London – abundance about Bristol – Maple Grove – cultivation – beds when to be renewed – gardeners thinking exactly different – no general rule – gardeners never to be put out of their way – delicious fruit – only too rich to be eaten much of – inferior to cherries – currants more refreshing – only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping – glaring sun – tired to death – could bear it no longer – must go and sit in the shade.”
Jane Austen is seen by Kreilkamp as epitomizing those novelists of the eighteenth century who “present a highly stylized representation of the conversations of a tiny educated elite as, in some sense, speech itself”. Step forward, Pamela and Mr B–, or indeed Shamela and Mr Booby, or Yorick and Uncle Toby. “In the heyday of Scott and Austen” (between them they more or less sum up, for Kreilkamp, the entire history of the novel before Dickens), “the novel purportedly produced a rational mode of edifying reading” – a statement which would have puzzled those for whom the novel was, in all seriousness, the work of the devil.
The many defects of argument in Kreilkamp’s book are not mended, and are in some instances made worse, by his own critical rhetoric. He is too often turgid, repetitious, unwittingly Gradgrindian: “The gain of such a broad-ranging approach lies, I hope, in an analytic purchase on a cultural and aesthetic phenomenon that, in its pervasiveness, itself tends to slide over and past divisions between different registers or cultural divisions”. He likes to follow a quotation with a helpful paraphrase (I think this comes from that deplorable form of orality, the academic lecture); so, for example, he quotes Gaskell: “It is enough to say, that this belief of the injustice and unkindness which they endure from their fellow-creatures, taints what might be resignation to God’s will, and turns it to revenge . . .”, and comments: “Poverty and resentment ‘taints’ and ‘turns . . . to revenge’ what might otherwise be ‘pious resignation’”. And along with the modern (male) academic’s nervousness of saying anything impious on the subject of gender goes a corresponding tendency, on Kreilkamp’s part, to flourish his feminist credentials, often with bathetic results: when Dickens, describing his career as a reporter, boasts of his prowess in transcribing “important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been to a young man severely compromising”, Kreilkamp seizes on the phrase “young man”, and (placing the emphasis exactly where Dickens cannot have intended it – on “man” rather than “young”) comments that it is “as if his masculinity might be called into question by any mis-transcription”. I like the pun on “mis”, but as a critical observation this is as absurd as the statement Kreilkamp makes a few pages later on the subject of David Copperfield’s tortuous experience of learning shorthand. The “wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies’ legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place”– all these features haunt David’s dreams because they “draw on a reservoir of anxieties about an unbounded female sexuality . . . . his utter bewilderment here may be read as a manifestation of a fear of feminization”. At least Kreilkamp spares us his opinion of the “pen-and-ink sky-rocket” which appears in the same passage.
Voice and the Victorian Storyteller has passages of exciting and suggestive analysis. There are good ideas and gems of observation buried in the rubble of dire professionalism. It is indeed the case that the problem of how to represent voice in print gave rise to some of Victorian literature’s most searching and evocative imaginative creations, especially, I would argue, in poetry – Kreilkamp rightly acknow-ledges The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry by Eric Griffiths, and I would have liked him to consider Tennyson’s In Memoriam and some of Hardy’s work, both in verse and prose; on the other hand, Kreilkamp’s chapter on Charlotte Brontë opens up a genuinely innovative approach to poets such as Christina Rossetti and Alice Meynell. In the sections on Gaskell’s Mary Barton, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness there are trenchant and persuasive arguments and some fine readings. I don’t agree with everything Kreilkamp says about Gaskell’s use of the figure of Samuel Bamford in Mary Barton, but it is arguable in the best sense, and ends with a shrewd exposition of the irony by which the paper Mary Barton uses to copy out a “beautiful little poem” by Bamford for her father should end up as wadding in the gun with which he murders Henry Carson. Kreilkamp is perfectly capable of generalizing and speculating in ways that arouse the reader’s admiration rather than their hackles, and of using quotation with forceful economy. On Villette: “It is at times impossible to say why Lucy chooses to suppress rather than express herself; the implication that she likes to suppress herself is what strikes many readers as the perversity of this particular novel. Her descriptions of vocal repression are often so eloquent as to define a poetics of withheld speech: ‘I held in the cry, I devoured the ejaculation, I forbade the start, I spoke and stirred no more than a stone’.”
The most brilliant and suggestive observation in Voice and the Victorian Storyteller comes towards the end, and aptly concerns itself with endings: Kreilkamp notices Thomas Edison’s boast that the phonograph would be an ideal way of “preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying member of the family – as of great men”, and makes the connection with the fate of the great man’s last words in Heart of Darkness, “The horror! the horror!” – words which the narrator, Marlow, both gives (to us) and withholds (from Kurtz’s “Intended”), words which emerge from the double disembodiment of the spectral speaker and the invisible storyteller. If Ivan Kreilkamp can do this kind of thing even once, why should he – or his readers – settle for less?
