Refiguring Speech: Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk

By Amy R. Wong

In this book, Amy R. Wong unravels the colonial and racial logic behind seemingly innocuous assumptions about "speech": that our words belong to us, and that self-possession is a virtue. Through readings of late-Victorian fictions of empire, Wong revisits the scene of speech's ideological foreclosures as articulated in postcolonial theory. Engaging Afro-Caribbean thinkers like Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter, Refiguring Speech reroutes attention away from speech and toward an anticolonial poetics of talk, which emphasizes communal ownership and embeddedness within the social world and material environment.

Analyzing novels by Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, George Meredith, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford, Wong refashions the aesthetics of disordered speech—such as parroting, eavesdropping, profuse inarticulacy, and dysfluency—into alternate forms of communication that stand on their own as talk. Wong demonstrates how late nineteenth-century Britain's twin crises of territorialization—of empire and of new media—spurred narrative interests in capturing the sense that speech's tethering to particular persons was no longer tenable. In doing so, Wong connects this period to US empire by constructing a genealogy of Anglo-American speech's colonialist and racialized terms of proprietorship. Refiguring Speech offers students and scholars of Victorian literature and postcolonial studies a powerful conceptualization of talk as an insurgent form of communication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781503635999

Book preview

Refiguring Speech

Late Victorian Fictions of Empire and the Poetics of Talk

AMY R. WONG

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2023 by Amy R. Wong. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

ISBN 9781503635173 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503635999 (electronic)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022045001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

Cover design and art: David Drummond

Typeset by Elliott Beard in Arno Pro 11/15

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE: Parroting With and Eavesdropping On Robert Louis Stevenson

TWO: Multilingual Talk and Bram Stoker’s White Cosmopolitics

THREE: George Meredith’s Profuse Inarticulacy

FOUR: Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s Dysfluent End of the World

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK BELIEVES NOT only that ideas and expression are generated in community, but also that what we say is never really ours. Nowhere will this seem truer than in these acknowledgments.

At UCLA, where this project began, I was lucky to find steadfast and dedicated mentors and a generous community of colleagues. Joseph Bristow’s patience in teaching and inspiring me to read, write, and think with humility and always toward precision has been a true gift. Jonathan Grossman’s exacting but generous mentorship has taught me that it is not enough to be smart, but that one has to really believe what one is writing. I am also grateful to other faculty members at UCLA whose work and guidance have variously inspired or shaped the directions this book has eventually taken: Ali Behdad, Michael Cohen, Helen Deutsch, Christopher Mott, Michael North, and Elinor Ochs. I also thank my graduate colleagues and friends, whose collective brilliance and good cheer made my graduate experience in Los Angeles a wonderful time: Katherine Bergren, Julia Callander, Stacie Cassarino, Daniel Diez Couch, Dustin Friedman, Amanda Hollander, Lisa Mendelman, Alex Milsom, Jason Morphew, Sarah Nance, Michael Nicholson, Justine Pizzo, Sina Rahmani, Taly Ravid, Cristina Richieri-Griffin, Lindsay Wilhelm, and Alex Zobel. To Jacquelyn Ardam and Will Clark, I am so grateful to you both for your brilliance, your realness, and your exquisite care.

At Dominican, I have found myself among warm colleagues. I am grateful to have spent the last six years in community with Joan Baranow, Thomas Burke, Ava Carl, Chase Clow, George Faithful, Gigi Gokcek, Jaime Libby, Jordan Lieser, Dan May, Whitney Myers, Radica Ostojic-Portello, Carlos Rodriguez, Laura Stivers, Cynthia Taylor, Julia van der Ryn, Sister Aaron Winkelmann, the members of the Diversity Action Group, and the many wonderful students whom I have had the privilege to teach. Special thanks to Nnekay FitzClarke for her unmatchable sense of humor, brilliance, and enduring support; to Perry Guevara for talking with me about our work and everything else; and to Judy Halebsky for her generosity and cheerleading me to the finish line. To Mary Marcy and Nicola Pitchford, thank you for your support and inspiration as exemplary women leaders. I wish also to thank the PREC Committee for my promotion and qualification for a sabbatical leave to finish this book, and also to Pomona College for a Graves Award in the Humanities in support of this project.

Among the many scholars in Victorian studies whom I have been lucky to meet in the past decade, I thank the following for reading or offering me opportunities to share work in progress, offering advice and support, or otherwise being in company and in conversation with ideas I have been thinking about: Zarena Aslami, Sukanya Banerjee, Manu Chander, Ryan Fong, Renee Fox, Elaine Freedgood, Jill Galvan, Devin Griffiths, John Jordan, Tricia Lootens, Daniel Martin, Richard Menke, Olivia Moy, Nasser Mufti, Cornelia Pearsall, Jason Rudy, Bea Sanford Russell, Matthew Sussman, Megan Ward, Roger Whitson, Carolyn Williams, Daniel Williams, and Susan Zieger. To the Berkeley English Nineteenth Century Working Group and attendees, especially Ian Duncan, Emma Eisenberg, Mary Mussman, Chloe Osborne, and Rudi Yniguez, and UCLA’s Nineteenth Century Group, especially Lilly Lu and Jessica Cook, thank you for your generous and sharp recent engagements with my work in progress. To Ronjaunee Chatterjee, if not for the singular experience of getting to think with you, I do not know who I would be or where I would belong as a scholar. To Alicia Mireles Christoff, the immense care, rigor, and intensity you bring to everything has been nothing short of inspirational and humbling.

My editor at Stanford University Press, Caroline McKusick, has simply been a dream to work with. I am so grateful for her care and enthusiasm in moving this book forward. My thanks also to the design team for coming up with a brilliant cover for my book. To the anonymous readers, thank you for the generosity with which you each saw and engaged the manuscript; it has felt like a rare privilege to receive such insightful and helpful reports–especially amid the circumstances of the recent pandemic. In addition, I have been extraordinarily blessed by the company of colleagues and friends in the Bay Area: Ashley Clarke, Jane Hu, Omar F. Miranda, Hannah Zeavin, and Dora Zhang, whose support and collective brilliance have helped to buoy my spirits and ferry this project toward its final stages.

Finally, I thank my extended community of family and friends who have contributed intellectually, psychically, and emotionally to the life of this seemingly never-ending project. Thank you to my parents, Mimi and Seung-Kai Wong, for their unstinting support of my education and career in the humanities; and to my sister, Maggie Wong, for her company, especially in these last few years in the Bay Area. To Helen Wolfman, Greg Poppe, and Jess Poppe, I am very grateful for your unconditional support and generosity. To Sydney Wong and Angela Lau, thank you for making it so easy to be family. Special thanks to the Bunker Buddies, Katherine Isokawa, David Chow, Nobi Chow, and Kai Isokawa, for keeping us safe and grounded; I could not have finished a book during the pandemic without you, you are the definition of extended family. To Christopher Bauer, Pearl Chaozon Bauer, Matt Cantor, Elizabeth Corinth, Kathryn Eidmann, Alex Fortes, Matthew Fox-Amato, Brendan Gillis, Manav Kumar, Jeremy Lawrence, Lauren Lawrence, Aimee Miller, Josh Patashnik, Greg Schmidt, Amritha Subramanian, and Kate Walker, your singular friendships have contributed to this work in numerous intangible but crucial ways. To Kate Fox-Amato, I will be eternally grateful to you for being there nearly from the beginning. To Glenn, thank you for your unflagging enthusiasm for my work, and for the everyday surround of the life we have made together with Rei and our loving dogs, Matilda, Oscar, and Ziggy. Rei, you are already the best person I know, and it’s a privilege to be your mom.

Introduction

On the other side of the bitter struggles against domination and for the liberation of the imagination, there opens up a multiply dispersed zone in which we are gripped by vertigo. But this is not the vertigo preceding apocalypse and Babel’s fall. It is the shiver of a beginning, confronted with extreme possibility.

—ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, The Poetics of Relation (1990)

THIS BOOK ENGAGES AN unusual grouping of four late Victorian fictions of empire, selected for how they illuminate features of a crisis of speech that reached a particularly intensified pitch in the final decades of the nineteenth century. By speech, I mean a certain proprietary fantasy in the Anglo-American imagination that prizes a perfect tethering of expression to intent, as well as its associated aesthetics of self-possession. In such a fantasy, speech is the act of flag burning that will finally deliver a clear-cut judiciary decision. In more mundane contexts, speech is the fluent and articulate lecture, or the perfectly witty comment delivered at just the right moment. In two fictions that are well known, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and two that are less so, George Meredith’s One of Our Conquerors (1891) and Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s jointly written The Inheritors: An Extravagant Story (1901), this kind of speech unravels in somewhat embarrassingly spectacular ways, alongside the colonialist selves and worlds that it sutures together. My approach to these fictions will be somewhat perverse in its bid to follow the logic of this unraveling further than these texts are willing to go. These fictions of empire share the sense that the unraveling of speech will mean the end of the world. My aim, instead, is to follow Afro-Caribbean thinkers—especially Édouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter—to show how these texts imagine, if unwittingly, the end of colonial worlding.

In each of my readings, I refigure the materials of speech that these literary works have already begun to disarticulate into a different poetics of communication, which I have opted simply to call talk. Talk, which I see as emerging out of scenes where speech fails, stands on its own poetics in a manner that has always exceeded Anglo-American speech’s colonialist, proprietary underpinnings. Talk is what forms like mimicry, inarticulacy, and dysfluency are if they were not described in terms of speech’s degeneration. Talk is also what Babel could be—a condition of multilingualism that is not the end of the world—if Anglo-American speech were not so obsessed with the self-possession of native English speakers. For Glissant, the multilingual conditions of the Caribbean and creolization give rise to his reworking of the Babel myth: there is neither an outside to nor a return from colonialism; métissage is the ontological condition from which anticolonial poetics finds the shiver of a beginning. What Glissant reworks is not colonialism so much as the view of colonialism as an end or ending. Taking inspiration from Glissant, and from other Afro-Caribbean thinkers whom Victorian studies rarely engaged in its encounter with postcolonial theory in the 1980s and 1990s, this book develops a conception of talk that seeks what may be on the other side of a struggle with and liberation from speech, offering a way around questions that have stalled out before the insurmountable ideological barriers to subaltern speech.

When Glissant insists on an aesthetic that is on the other side of liberation from the colonial imaginary, he offers "errantry [errance]" as a new model of relation-making. According to Glissant, errantry is rhizomatic, with a nod toward Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s well-known formulation, but distinct from the nomadic movement shared by the Western exile and the conqueror alike.¹ In both exile and conquest, argues Glissant, the origin remains a major point of reference: in the former, there may be a rejection of (or more complicated negotiation with) one’s roots; in the latter, the root becomes transient, striving to generalize that which is actually particular. This process of generalizing the particular, and erasing the traces of particularity, is central to the project of Western colonialism. Errantry, however, escapes such identificatory consolidations and makes space for what might be contingently formed through a relationship with others.² Its dialectical movements are situated, where totality is merely conceive[d] and any claims to sum it up or to possess it are immediately renounce[d]. An errant person plunges into the opacities of that part of the world to which he has access. But errance is by no means idle adventure or blind wandering—rather, as translator Betsy Wing has clarified, errantry . . . knows at every moment where one is—at every moment in relation to the other.³ One may begin with vertiginous feeling amid the opacities, but it is a moral imperative in errantry to attempt to know where one is in relation, as limited as that knowing may be.⁴

This is the manner of situating—rather than mapping—that I will take up, in my account of late Victorian fictions of empire, and in relation to other scholarly conceptions of speech I have encountered. Acknowledgment that the constellations I set up here are necessarily partial ones is also important for honoring the nonaerial view from which any poetics of relation works. When Glissant says access, I think of how we are primarily conditioned by our positioning in any given domain (professional, social, and so forth), though our conditioning is also produced from less structured—and more opaque—circumstances and experiences. For instance, my own path to borrowing a sense of talk from sociolinguistic understandings—as I will later elaborate upon—might owe as much to an immigrants’ child’s awareness of language bias and scholarly trends coinciding with my graduate education as to my own (nonexhaustive) review of approaches in search of an apt conceptualization of this book’s primary concerns. I wish to make clear up front that methodological positioning is always an immersed project of incomplete mapping and also that literary criticism itself is a constructed aesthetic: as Wynter cautions, rethinking the aesthetics of coloniality means turning a deciphering practice (we could say, a disarticulating one) not only on the objects of our criticism but also on how our criticism is made.⁵ Albeit from a perspective oriented less toward criticism as aesthetics, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has also warned that the production of theory is also a practice; the opposition between abstract ‘pure’ theory and concrete ‘applied’ practice is too quick and easy.⁶ It is important, given the particular arguments this book makes, to point out that what we have often thought of as mapping out our work in relation to what is imagined as a stable and bounded field hides its own citational politics; that politics, too, may be motivated toward proprietary—and colonialist—regulation.

*   *   *

Here, I will offer a brief detour into an account of a small archive of Victorian manuals on the art of conversation, which catalyzed a set of questions and concerns that would eventually result in this book. Though they will not be featured in the chapters that follow, I marshal them here as objects that not only tell something of an origin story for this project, but also are capable of telegraphically laying out the interwoven concerns of this book. My initial encounter with them several years ago inspired questions such as why somewhat abstract qualities of speech like fluency were entangled with proprietary rights of transfer, whether a disdain for mass print media in these manuals had something to do with the stakes of owning speech, and how late nineteenth-century concerns about Britain’s quickly expanding empire might enter into these manuals’ territorializing formations of a domestic, bourgeois speech community. These manuals (and sometimes also periodical essays written in a similar style) were clearly aimed at a growing middle and upper-middle class with aspirations to leisure, and became most popular in the 1880s before tapering off after the turn of the century. As I will lay out here, these manuals sought not only to naturalize certain social performances of speech, but also to regulate how speech should circulate; as such, they are a part of a territorialization of speech that, as I will argue, becomes markedly frenetic in the final decades of the Victorian era, and the British empire’s rush to its height.

The only scholarly survey of these handbooks and essays on conversation I have found is an account appended to E. A. W. St. George’s book, Browning and Conversation (1993); in his study of Robert Browning’s somewhat truculent conversational poetics, the manuals serve mainly to illustrate a form of Victorian bourgeois congeniality that Browning resisted.⁷ With an emphasis on conversation as a pastime or leisure activity (rather than, say, a form of idealized, rational exchange, as sought under a conversational paradigm familiar to eighteenth-century republicanism), these manuals were directed toward the naturalization of a certain upper-middle-class political aesthetic that had clearly emerged by the late nineteenth century.⁸ As Rosetta Young has argued, though the term upper middle class did not become common until around 1860, the nineteenth-century Anglo-American novel from Jane Austen to Henry James played a central role, alongside etiquette manuals, in establishing a certain form of sociable conversation as a speech genre possessed of quasi-magical, capital-generating qualities.⁹ Reflecting an upper-middle-class sense of leisure, Roger Boswell defines conversation in The Art of Conversation (1867) as mak[ing] the time pass agreeably, for others as well as ourselves;¹⁰ similarly, for J. P. Mahaffy—Oscar Wilde’s tutor at Trinity College Dublin—in his Principles on the Art of Conversation, conversation is a daily pleasure, a recreation open to all.¹¹ Though such language suggests universality, these accounts do rather little to cover up the fact that these manuals were intended for those who could afford enough of an escape from routines of labor to develop congenial selves through the proper circulations of speech: after all, the manuals often reference settings of domestic, bourgeois interior spaces, such as drawing rooms, dining rooms, supper tables, and even staircases.¹²

Still, the Victorian art of conversation manuals maintained, at least rhetorically, this openness to all. In upholding principles of circulation, such as fluency, pacing, and balance, that remained somewhat abstract, these manuals also tried to reside in an impersonal realm of unquestioned common sense. What something like flow entails, for instance—if it is about pacing or rhythm, or if it is a property of a single speaker or a matter of conversational relays—receives little elaboration. Such abstracted principles of form and transfer without much further detail represent an important departure from both more prescriptive conduct manuals of the eighteenth century, and rather technical Victorian elocution manuals for the university elite.¹³ In a preface to his manual, The Ability to Converse (1912), for instance, Stanley M. Bligh expresses anxiety lest his readers mistake his work as a guide to conversational formularies; rather, his is a theory of conversational planes (anecdotal, personal, scientific, political, aesthetic, ethical, spiritual) that wishes, above all, that speakers remain as free and unconstrained as possible to adapt and enlarge conversation to suit [their] own purposes.¹⁴ Bligh considers his conversational planes something of an innovation, but they share with earlier manuals an ethos of what might be called form at a middle distance—in line, for instance, with what Mahaffy describes as the natural easy flow of talk, which consists in following the chances of the moment, drifting with the temper of the company, suiting the discourse to whatever subject may turn up.¹⁵

The matter-of-fact, the commonsensical: these are the accompanying affective tenors of form at a middle distance, which contribute to the naturalization of such properties as equality, flow, and adaptability. Such properties, in my mind, are ultimately preoccupied with embodiment and territorial control. Apportioning speech quantities, the regulation of flow, and the idealizing of a responsiveness to environment are aligned with proprietary logic, where to possess speech and to know how and when to transfer it slides into being a self-possessed person. But why this recourse to these proprietary abstractions of conversational form, at this time? Against what perceived threats, exactly, were these seemingly matter-of-fact art of conversation manuals defending?

One answer that the manuals themselves bring to the surface is a shared sense that the conditions of late nineteenth-century media, especially the growing availability of cheap print, caused regulatory anxieties about the entrance of working-class readers into the spaces of the virtual public sphere. Though, again, not always explicit about class, the art of conversation manuals typically take as given that conversation is a dying art in need of rescue because of the rise of cheap forms of mass print. It is not hard to see, for instance, that when Jane Francesca Wilde (Oscar Wilde’s mother) worries that newspapers, periodicals, and cheap literature were destroy[ing] beauty, grace, style, dignity, and the art of conversation, she is holding up an imagined, closed-off, and prior world of speech to counter anxieties about unsavory print materials infiltrating the social world of middle-and upper-class Victorians.¹⁶ Similarly, the class-inflected worries that mass print could have a degenerative effect on individual and social mores might be readily observed from how the author of How to Shine in Society; Or, The Art of Conversation laments that in the present age, wherever you go, whether into a railway carriage, a steamboat, a restaurant, or a coffee-house, two-thirds of your fellow travellers have a book, a paper, or a pamphlet before them.¹⁷ In the view of this author, these forms of print consumption easily become addictions, like smoking or dram-drinking, removing individuals from the commonsensical good of social circulation and converse. If such sentiments seem familiar in our own day—in injunctions to put down our phones and return to face-to-face interaction, as featured, for instance, in Sherry Turkle’s best-selling critiques of social media—it might be worth looking more critically at what world of speech such injunctions imagine a return to, and who makes it up.¹⁸

Of course, these Victorian art of conversation manuals were also a part of the burgeoning forms of print ephemera that they were railing against—and thus, many of them note their own existence as something of a rapprochement with the new conditions of media. When the authors of manuals considered the relationship between periodicals and conversation, for instance, they tended to say how the former should always be in service to the latter: commonplace books should be kept to store only article titles and other tidbits that might be recalled for conversation, as Roger Boswell recommends, and they should always be updated to avoid stagnant conversation.¹⁹ Likewise, Mahaffy regards popular society papers, such as Punch, as mere aids to agreeable chitchat, asserting that these papers owe their circulation to their usefulness in furnishing topics for . . . conversation.²⁰ Book men and voracious consumers of newspapers, periodicals, and handbooks alike receive Mahaffy’s censure, for the enormous increase of the means of acquiring knowledge . . . are by no means accompanied by corresponding strides in the art of conversation.²¹ Whether thinking of print as a conversational aid, or pointing to reading and speaking as incommensurate skillsets, such comments tended to enact protective, territorializing distinctions to cordon off speech communities from the wider world of print.

When I was first considering these manuals, I was also thinking about which literary objects seemed most apt for illustrating different facets of a crisis in speech I was locating within the late Victorian period. On the one hand, fictions about empire seemed an obvious choice for understanding the stakes of speech in late nineteenth-century literature, given the moment in which nineteenth-century British literature became an important archive for postcolonial theorists—most notably, Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha—interested in the matter of limits to subaltern voicing. On the other hand, the question of subaltern speech has become, in both Victorian and postcolonial studies, somewhat over and done with, even a dead end, to be regarded, as Rey Chow has more recently brought up, with some wistful melancholy.²² Moreover, I wanted to retain what I was thinking about in relation to the democratizing but also increasingly fragmented media landscape’s perceived threats to longstanding Anglo-American understandings of speech, not least because of the obvious relevance of such matters to the twenty-first century. Given these considerations, it was not entirely clear to me how to proceed—and for someone specializing in Victorian literature, the study of media is often segregated from the study of empire and race.²³

Mulling over these conundrums, I came across what can only be described as a gallingly racist but throwaway beginning to Mahaffy’s manual that I had glossed over in my earlier and admittedly cursory review of the archive of art of conversation manuals:

Whatever contempt the North American Indian or the Mohammedan Tartar may feel for talking as mere chatter, it is agreed among us that people must meet frequently, both men and women, and that not only is it agreeable to talk, but that it is a matter of common courtesy to say something, even when there is hardly anything to say.²⁴

Now race is not explicit like this in most other manuals, nor apparent in the way that class politics is from how these manuals discuss media consumption. But as Rei Terada has cautioned, the demarcation of the racial from the nonracial is a colonialist nineteenth-century technology, traceable in particular to Hegelian philosophy’s understanding of historicity and consequently, what is real as nonracial.²⁵ Though with a keener focus on racial logic and work from Black studies, Terada’s argument about the legacy of Hegel complements what postcolonial thinkers like Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Gauri Viswanathan have argued in their work on the inextricability of the nineteenth-century British literary canon from imperialism.²⁶ It therefore occurred to me that the throwaway nature of Mahaffy’s comment and the general absence of race (the seeming nonracial concerns of the manuals) make race-thinking even more important, more grounding, more commonsensical.

Read with more attention, and in relation to other manuals, Mahaffy’s comment unfolds Darwinian-inflected, racialized hierarchies that point to speech as a matter of territorial control. The contrast between the ostensibly nonconversational (and by extension, noncongenial, uncivilized) Native Americans and Muslim Turks—two very different groups from very different parts of the globe strategically flattened and fused together—does more than distinguish the us of the civilized West from its other. It enables a universal consolidation of this us, which makes