Abstract
The more popular a literary concept, the more unstable its status will tend to be. This seems especially true of voice, a noun whose potential for metaphorical extension has led to divergent formulations across disciplines. Leaving aside its technical senses in phonetics and grammar, voice is central to narratology, where it entertains a complex relationship with perspective, subjectivity and speech presentation (Wales, 2010 [1990]: 437). The ‘who is speaking?’ question, for instance, guides Timothy R. Austin’s Poetic Voices: Discourse Linguistics and the Poetic Text, which makes an assumption about the readerly need to ‘discern a speaker’ (Austin, 1994: 161). Yet the practice-oriented aims of stylistics may lead to a reification of such concepts before a critique of their ontological status has been carried out. In other words, a concept may risk being treated as a given with immediate descriptive purchase. Nowell Smith’s (2015) On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation embodies the opposite attitude. The author’s suspicion of essentialism manifests itself in his stated aim, which is not that ‘of uncovering voice itself’ but rather that of ‘inhabiting the fissures opened up by these conflicting configurations’ (p. 3). This monograph, it needs to be made clear, is not a work in stylistics. It is, rather, a work in ‘speculative poetics’ (p. 14), the discursive pace of which reflects the influence of continental philosophy.
The introduction opens with the foundational question ‘what do we mean by voice in poetry?’ (p.1). Instead of providing an answer, Nowell Smith problematises the question itself before proposing to re-arrange existing conceptualisations of voice according to a distinction between ‘figuring as’ and ‘figuring through’ (p.3). Voice can be figured, for instance, as speech sound, subjectivity or speech. At the same time, however, voice is figured through ‘prosodic and rhetoric repertoires’ (p. 3). He then provides a provisional typology of such conceptualisations, fully explored in the remainder of the book: (1) different voices (personae, or pre-personae when not sufficiently differentiated as speakers); (2) vocal lines, relative to the musical and rhythmic aspects of language; (3) vocal attitudes, comprising of the linguistic categories of register and address; and (4) voicings, that is, the performance (overtly vocalised or sub-vocalised in silent reading) demanded of readers.
While this broad systematisation is praiseworthy for its clarity, it also lays bare that voice is a conglomerate of distinct conceptualisations. Such unwieldy pluralism is problematic for the stylistician, who would consider each heading a separate area of enquiry (Austin’s aforementioned work, for instance, takes voice to belong to the first category only). But Nowell Smith’s endeavour is much less bound to analytic purposes, so embracing this complexity becomes a sign of intellectual honesty towards the concept itself. Stylistics draws on concepts to better understand texts; Nowell Smith’s speculative poetics, conversely, draws on texts – poems and philosophical works alike – to better understand the concepts. This is why the author aptly warns that ‘the readings of individual poems that make up a large proportion of this book cannot stand as ‘exempla’ for a general theory, but provisional means of pursuing a train of thought’ (p.14; emphasis mine). In spite of this, stylistic knowledge still matters insofar as Nowell Smith is avowedly interested in ‘the singular exploration of the medium that is the very life of the poem’ (p.10, my emphasis).
Chapter 1 explores the relationship between human speech and the imitation of animal voice through onomatopoeia and glossolalia. It opens with ‘The Woodlark’ by Gerald Manley Hopkins, in which the first line represents the voice of the bird through a non-lexical onomatopoeia, whilst the second, fully lexical line represents the voice of man. The analysis paves the way for a discussion on the origins of language in relation to voice that is the undisputable core of the chapter. The views of Herder, Agamben and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are woven within an argument that explores the relationship between imitation and signification. Even thought the nuances of the arguments might not be fully appreciated without a solid philosophical background, stylisticians will fruitfully realise that these philosophers’ views predate or parallel behaviourist theories of language acquisition.
Nowell Smith acknowledges yet backgrounds contributions from linguistics, which I find surprising in a book that appears in a series called ‘Language, Discourse, Society’. In this chapter I have counted only one quotation from discourse analyst Ann Wennerstrom and a cursory mention of Richard Cureton and Reuven Tsur. Confined to a footnote, Noam Chomsky is tellingly absent from the bibliography, despite an allusion to his innatist theory of language acquisition in the phrase ‘the inevitable possession of the faculty for language’ (p. 25). Even so, the argument that voice undermines the sound versus sense binarism is intriguing, and should keep stylisticians alert to the danger of viewing clear-cut distinctions as constitutive of linguistic reality. The chapter is enriched by readings of poems spanning different centuries and borders (e.g. Blake, Artaud, Pascoli, and Crashaw). This breadth of scope is a constant aspect of the book and an indicator of the ambitions of the poetics it outlines. Incidentally, since all the poems are reported in their original language only, the absence of an English translation for those written in French, Italian and German makes the book less reader-friendly than it could have been.
Chapter 2 builds on Jacques Derrida’s meditations on voice as a liminal point between the self and the other. Nowell Smith offers the example of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa’s voice is transfigured much more subtly than his body, thus provoking an uncanny mixed feeling of self-recognition and self-alienation. This literary intuition is then brilliantly paired to our unease at hearing our own voice recorded by a machine – incidentally, this interest in prosthetics informs much of Chapter 5. Nowell Smith’s agenda is to destabilise ‘the link of voice with interiority’ (p. 49) that harks back to Aristotle’s De Anima and that is also a tenet of narratology and stylistics. The author does so by drawing attention to the conflicting co-presence, in Hardy’s ‘The Voice’, of past tense and the deictic import of the interjection ‘yes’. He interprets such stylistic evidence as a cue to both interior meditation and exteriorised voicing, a reading in line with the liminal nature of voice endorsed throughout the whole book. Other philosophers and literary theorists that nurture Nowell Smith’s speculation in these pages are Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva.
Chapter 3 (‘Turnings of the Breath’) explores how poetry, through its prosodic and metrical patterning, evokes competing voicings in readers. Analysing a sonnet by John Keats, the author draws attention to the temporal deictic ‘then’, whose indexical force would demand the attribution of stress against the sonnet’s metrical template. The analysis of alternative voicings is as engaging as carefully traced, with the aid of musical terminology (e.g. sotto voce and rallentando). Metrical scansion is thus promoted from ‘a metrical exercise’ to ‘a means of negotiating the demands on our voicings’ (p. 79). Another prominent figure of voice is addressivity as instantiated by Charles Baudelaire’s use of apostrophe, which cues the transition from poem as mimesis to poem as event. John L. Austin’s theory of illocutionary acts is duly mentioned, but only in passing – again, while Nowell Smith is aware of proposals from linguistics, he keeps them at the periphery of his reading practice. This attitude may be seen as covertly polemical, for this plurality of voicings is recruited as an argument against the assumption (endorsed, for instance, in Austin’s aforementioned Poetic Voices: Discourse Linguistics and the Poetic Text) that poems resemble speech acts. Very instructive is also Nowell Smith’s questioning of Jonathan Culler’s treatment of ‘lyric voice’ in statically visual terms. This critique is indeed part of the book’s overarching commitment to ‘the work of animation’ set up by voice.
Chapter 4 explores the political dimension of voice. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is commented on at length because its thematisation of voice as political representation allows Nowell Smith to ponder the relationship between voice and speech. Following Aristotle, the author argues that instrumental reason is the defining feature of speech and sets it apart from voice. He thus spells out the political implication of this difference: ‘what is at stake in the shift from voice to speech, on this account, is nothing less than freedom, the fact of being a subject’ (p. 109). This is why Coriolanus, dismissing the plebeians’ speech as voice, intended to devalue their democratic demands. The discussion ventures into the relationship between vernacular writing and language politics, from Dante Alighieri’s De Vulgari Eloquentia to James Kelman’s use of Glasgow’s accent in How late it was, how late. The written representation of accent is an important area of enquiry in stylistics, where it is seen as a tool of characterisation and social realism (Adamson, 1999: 603). Nowell Smith is however less interested in its techné than in the change of mind-set this representation might engender in readers. He sees nonstandard orthography ‘not as the “phonetic” transcription of accent’ but more broadly as a means to demand ‘a different conception of what language is and does’ (p. 119). This fits his politically committed agenda even at the cost of favouring a readerly attitude beyond the specifics of each literary work.
Chapter 5 sets out to gauge the ‘in-between’ nature of voice with the purpose of ‘getting the measure of voice’. Through a metrical scansion of John Donne’s ‘The Triple Fool’, Nowell Smith proposes an alternative conceptualisation of metre whereby metre is not ‘an external constraint’, but rather ‘a prosthetic to thought […] a vehicle, and mode, of thinking’ (p. 139). The author’s interest in prosthetics emerges again when he likens the typewriter to a gramophone under the influence of Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’. In this manifesto, Olson welcomed the use of a typewriter as a means to ‘indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension even of syllables’ (Olson, 1997: 245). Faithful to its open-ended nature, the book renounces a conclusion, marking with a final question its own discourse as provisional.
Overall, this is an honest and ambitious monograph with a remarkably clear sense of intellectual positioning. Its chapters, interconnected without being sequentially interdependent, demonstrate that it is possible ‘to establish coherence without imposing a determinate centre’ (p. 156). The book is recommended reading for those stylisticians interested in the philosophy of language and for all those who believe, as I do, that we become better scholars by measuring ourselves against those whose theoretical assumptions seem to diverge so radically from ours.