"You Must Make Less Noise in Here, Mister Schouler": Acoustic Profiling in American Realism

"YOU MUST MAKE LESS NOISE IN HERE, MISTER SCHOULER": ACOUSTIC PROFILING IN AMERICAN REALISM Philipp Schweighauser University of Basel, Switzerland When Walt Whitman proudly named America a "nation ofnations" and celebrated "the perpetual coming of immigrants" in his 1 855 preface to Leaves ofGrass,] he referred both to the settlement of America by European immigrants and to a process that was only just beginning when he published the first edition of his monumental book of poetry. The historian Philip Jenkins describes this process as follows: American industrial expansion was made possible by the ready availability of cheap labour in the form of the huge numbers of migrants entering the country from the 1860s onwards. From the 188Os the scale of migration constituted the largest population movement in recorded history. Between 1881 and 1920 there were over 23 million immigrants: 1907 was the peak year, with 1 .2 million newcomers ___ This migration had a radical effect on the ethnic composition of the United States. Before 1880 the vast majority of immigrants came from the British Isles or Northern Europe, chiefly Germany; but after that point the emphasis shifted decisively to the peoples of southern and eastern Europe, including Italians, Poles, Hungarians and all the nationalities of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In 1870 New York City had 80,000 Jews; by 1915 there were 1 .5 million. By 1930 perhaps six million Americans were of Italian stock.2 Realist and later writers, confronted with a dramatic increase in immigration , were often far less enthusiastic than Whitman about the growing ethnic diversity ofthe United States. In their texts, the new immigrant voices came under careful and often critical scrutiny. A common representational strategy was to emphasize the obscurity of foreign-sounding speech. Howells participates in this when, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), he has Basil March comment on "the jargon" of the Neapolitans' "unintelligible dialect,"3 and so does Henry Adams in The Education (1907) when he evokes the olfactory and linguistic profile of "a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs."4 Immigrant voices, Howells and Adams seem to imply, are often nothing 86Philipp Schweighauser but unintelligible noise. Howells's representation ofthe German-American socialist Lindau's speech follows a similar pattern as its exaggerated mispronunciations undermine the seriousness of his concerns: "What is Amerigan? Dere iss no Ameriga anymore! You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit ofhappiness. And where haf you endedt?" (276). Daniel Borus links the portrayal of Lindau's speech to the processes of exclusion enacted by realist texts: "There are limits to the realist approach. At times realists seemed incapable of penetrating fully into the lives of their subjects. Much as Howells pointed up the foreignness ofLindau's speech through spellings that overemphasized mispronunciations ("lawss"), realists marked out some of 'the people' as inferior or as distant."5 Lindau's heavy accent serves to reinforce the otherness and strangeness of his socialist ideas. In Norris' s McTeague (1899), similar processes ofexclusion are at work. Mr. Sieppe's ridiculously exaggerated German accent and garbled syntax combine with his militaristic posturing to produce the caricature of a German-American who functions as the novel's primary laughingstock : "Owgooste!" he shouted to the little boy with the black greyhound, "you will der hound und der basket number three carry. Der tervins," he added, calling to the two smallest boys, who were dressed exactly alike, "will releef one unudder mit der camp-stuhl and basket number four. Dat is comprehend, hay? When we make der start, you childern will in der advance march. Dat is your orders."6 More interesting still is the case of Marcus Schouler, Mr. Sieppe's nephew. While not afflicted with the linguistic shortcomings of his uncle, Marcus's speech is repeatedly designated as noise. The reader meets Marcus as he accompanies McTeague to a saloon in the novel's first chapter: Marcus had picked up a few half-truths ofpolitical economy—it was impossible to say where—and as soon as they had settled themselves to their beer in...