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  • Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism
  • C.B. Davis (bio)
Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. By Stephen Connor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 449 pp.; illustrations. $35.00 cloth.

Stephen Connor's ambitious and erudite book on the decidedly slippery subject of ventriloquism is difficult to categorize. He calls it a "cultural history" because it examines a wide range of "cultural jurisdictions" that have historically engaged ventriloquial themes and practices. The archival texts he examines are primarily from theological, scientific, literary-critical, and ethical discourses. Previous histories of ventriloquism either have been popularized or written as esoteric works concerned with arcane origins, scientific explanations, and narratives of ventriloquial prowess. Since most of these were published between the early 18th and late 19th century, the core of Connor's book is appropriately a "history of the history of ventriloquism" (14). But Connor uses this received history to [End Page 174] inquire into the meaning and powers of the voice in its relation to space and the body across the broad context of Western culture.

There is a great deal of disparity amidst the range of practices that have been linked with the cognates of the Latinate ventriloquism (lit. "belly-speaking," a translation of the Greek engastrimythos). Connor emphasizes the "disembodied voice" as the unifying feature of the various phenomena he examines, which include inspired prophecy, demon possession, necromancy, speech from the womb or orifices other than the mouth, and belief in a rare natural ability to "throw" the voice or to speak "inwardly." Because he is interested in the larger thematic links between these practices, he does not attempt to read against the texts for hints as to what practitioners were actually doing, nor does he stray far from the program of previous histories of ventriloquism in the choosing of the premodern sources he examines. Later chapters offer fascinating cultural correspondences between the development of audio technology and the revival of spiritualism in the late 19th and early 20th century. Similarly, Connor describes how the appearance of the automaton in theWestern imagination coincided with the increasing use of "dummies" in ventriloquist performance.

Some of the most interesting sections of the book are only marginally related to performance. Connor's cultural analysis of the literature of possession and his commentary on ventriloquist characters in fiction are particularly fascinating. From a strictly performance studies perspective, the major fault with Connor's book is his failure to critique the traditional theory that ventriloquist entertainment developed from the supposedly deceptive techniques of spirit mediums. An acceptance of traditional lore and a misplaced faith in etymology led earlier historians of ventriloquism to focus on the "belly-speaking" prophets rather then look for ancient evidence of vocal illusion and mimicry in performance contexts. Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance sources also narrate vocal pranks and deceptions very similar to the ones Connor depicts as originating with the picaresque ventriloquist of the 18th and 19th centuries. But his compliance with the "origin myth" of ventriloquist performance by no means devalues his research or the many cultural insights derived from it. For example, Connor sees in the movement from supernatural possession to the secular entertainment that the concept of ventriloquism "became associated with the control of space rather than with the invasion of the body," thus becoming "a male accomplishment rather than a female malady" (277). This is an intriguing cultural observation, but it avoids the problem of proving that male entertainers and pranksters deliberately appropriated the techniques of female mediums.

Connor's analysis incorporates recent theory on the voice, such as the work of film scholars Michel Chion and Rick Altman. He also makes productive use of other specialized cultural histories, for example, Claire Kahane's Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative and the Figure of the Speaking Woman (1995). Connor's own major theoretical coinage is the concept of "vocalic space," by which he signifies "the ways in which the voice is held both to operate in, and itself to articulate, different conceptions of space, as well as to enact the different relations between the body community, time, and divinity" (12). The major problem with Connor's conception of the voice as a mediator between the...

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