Voice Inverse

Last summer I attended "Victorian Soundings," a conference sponsored by the Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz. The call for papers caught my ear, because the litany of possible topics sounded like a lyric poem:

Ear trumpets, deafness and mutism
Telegraphs, "wireless" and radios
Phonographs
Telephones

Bells, whistles, chimes
Orchestras and bands
Echoes, cries and whispers
Operas, instruments, street criers
Sound effects

Machines in motion
"ringing down the grooves of change"
Babbling brooks, sermons in stones
The sound of work
Bodily noises

Ventriloquists and dummies
Gossip/rumor/word of mouth
Speaking for/speaking to
Spirit voices/table rapping
Voices on stage

Narrative voices
Reading aloud
Rhymes and discord
Radio adaptations
Foreign accents, gendered voices
Dialect and dialogue

With each strophe of this ode to sound came the announcement of a general rubric: "Acoustic Devices," "Making Noise," "The Noise of Objects," "Sound and Speech," "Voicing Literature." There seemed to be a progression, from the mechanical reproduction and physical production of sound, to spiritualized forms for the transformation of noise into speech, culminating in the performance of literary voices ranging from "narrative" to "dialogue." Missing from this list, but deeply implicated in its increasingly metaphorical reading of voice, is the sound of Victorian poetry. How did poems resound within the auditory culture of Victorian England? There are many reasons (beyond "rhymes") to read poetry as an important medium for the articulation of Victorian ideas about voice. Victorian poems circulated as "acoustic devices" for the mediation of voice, preceding and perhaps even predicting the sound reproduction technologies that emerged in the course of the nineteenth century.

The conference prompted me to think again about these multiple inventions, conventions, and configurations of voice in Victorian poetry. As I learned from my colleagues about the mechanization of sound and hearing in Victorian communication networks, I was thinking how Victorian poems also worked as a mechanism for the disembodiment of voice, and with similar contradictory effects: sometimes invoking and evoking the spoken word, but also revoking it. Over the past decade Victorianists have been interested in linking the transformation of nineteenth-century writing to new forms for the transmission, transcription, and inscription of sound, but as we are riding the crest of this new wave of "sound studies" now is a good moment to return to the question of voice in verse as well.¹ While Victorian poets were astonished that a metaphor (voice) could be carried by technology, it seems that we at a different historical moment are carried away by the desire to recover and discover the voices of Victorian poetry. Why do we insist on reading literally what the Victorians understood to be a metaphor? What is the voice we are looking for, or think we hear, when we read a Victorian poem? How can we reverse our tendency to read these poems as the utterance of a speaker, the representation of speech, the performance of song? Perhaps we need to look for the various inversions of voice in Victorian poetry, to read again its remarkable performance of voice inverse.

In this special issue of Victorian Poetry, we are invited into an open conversation by Linda Hughes, who has arranged the contributions "in an extended dialogue" with one another, voice to voice if not face to face. "Whither Victorian Poetry?" is a thought-provoking question that leads the contributors in different directions while also leading them back to what I take to be the critical problem of voice. It is my hope that the new "voices" in the field will call into question the old voice (the old "speaker" of the New Criticism?) that haunts our reading of Victorian poetry. Beginning with "an appropriately provocative note," as Linda Hughes notes in Erik Gray's reading of Sight and Song, and ending with John Picker's equivocal meditation on Tennyson in "The Two Voices," many of the essays in this special issue revolve, either implicitly or explicitly, around the assumption that poems are transcriptions or prescriptions for voice. Some locate a speaker in their reading...